An Ambivalent Girl's Metamorphosis
by fascalia
Summary: Haruno Sakura is a girl without much ambition, but when the world feasts on her innocence and humans are cruel, she has to survive. However, when she sees things that does not have flesh, how will she manage? Rated M because people.
1. Gato is Really a Pain in the Ass

Prologue

The shape of a small man ran through a dark, cracked and sandy corridor, sweating profusely as his egawa laden feet clanked against the marble floor to the beat of his thrumming heart.

The vial which was inside the scroll he had clipped to his belt, containing the three pills, could never leave the compound. It was his mission to protect the vial, until his last breath. Everything had turned to dust. He cursed and ran through a short corridor, leading to a larger hall. He kept to the shadows, and listened.

Chiyo-sama had warned him to attend the program. He hadn't listened. Her legacy had made it possible to create what was inside the vial with his knowledge. It would be an evolutionary step in the shinobi world, changing everything. She just hadn't understood. And she had actually believed him when he'd said the fire had destroyed everything.

So he was well aware of the importance he carried. Almost too aware.

He had grown anxious in the past weeks. The program had created an incredible thing, but it was a dangerous responsibility - that was the reason for the fire which had destroyed unimportant documents in a ruse to cover what they had done. And then, he had started to notice things in the facility, shadows lurking, a sound too out of place, a researcher with a different shade in her eyes. Something had been wrong, but he hadn't listened to that small voice in the back of his mind. None had.

Someone had watched them create it. He was sure of it now.

Since his anxiety had proven to be correct, coming to fruition as his comrades fell limp to a gas thirty minutes ago to an invisible threat. He himself, however, had been the apprentice of Chiyo-sama and had an resistance to the paralyzing gas. Grabbing the vial, he had secured it into a scroll with a complex code and ran towards the secret passage that went directly to The Suna capitol through a maze of sandy tunnels he was one of few who knew the way.

Organizing his jumbled stressed thoughts, he saw that he had to get to the Kazekage, bring him the vial, protect it. Get to the secret passage. The strange presence should never get it.

Blinking, he thought for a second to destroy it, but then shame and guilt overcame him. It was too important, even if it was dangerous. He couldn't destroy twenty seven years of work just like that.

Tap, tap, tap, tap

Someone, almost languidly, walked towards him.

Curses.

He needed to confuse his intentions to the stranger on where he was going. The man made a sharp turn and went into a hidden doorway, through an old creaking metal staircase and found himself back at the laboratory.

He blinked.

Carnage. He found the bodies of his fellow researchers, doctors and libertarians scattered in pieces, hanging in lumps on hooks from the roof. The fleshy dripping pieces of hands, breasts and innards hung on small meat hooks. Darkness. It was like stars blinking like red angry eyes, watching.

It was humiliation in its most sacred carnal form.

His world exploded and he saw, he saw, his right eye hang in veins from his skull, and blood was everywhere, but he had to protect the vial.

"Don't-" he begged. Prayed. But his god was evil, or he chose to ignore his pleadings, as blood splattered from his stomach in a beautiful cascade of the wine of his body.

The vial!

Was his last thought as he heard a laughter, the sound rolling like waves of blood in the air, and someone stepped on his chest and he felt the weight of the vial disappear, as well as the world.

* * *

Chapter 1

Gato is Really a Pain in the Ass

How could I have been so stupid?

Sakura trembled as Gato's knife pressed at her throat. How could she have been so careless?

"Stay away! Or I'll slit this girl's throat!" Gato yelled and Sakura saw Kakashi-sensei still at the bridge. Gato pulled her hair painfully and bared her throat even more to the sharp edge of the knife. Tears streamed down her flushed cheeks and it took all her willpower not to sob unsightly as she gasped. Gato was a tiny man, as short as she was, but he was stronger than he looked. His grip of her hair, the knife at her throat, and she couldn't do anything.

Naruto and Sasuke still fought Haku in that ice cage so they didn't see, didn't know, and Kakashi and Zabuza looked at Gato with something akin to scorn. But Sakura also felt that gaze slowly transcend to her. As if their eyes were saying she was just as stupid as Gato.

"Ka-kakashi-sensei-", she choked.

Shit, she cursed. Shit. But Kakashi-sensei would save her, right? He'd get Gato easily. A kunai in the old man's shoulder would-

"Stay back!" Gato yelled again as he fitfully backed away from the center of the bridge and yanked Sakura's hair. She yelped. He had probably realised he wouldn't survive if he stayed in the bloodshed. So he'd taken the weakest shinobi as a shield.

Sakura saw Kakashi nod, as if saying he'd come get her later. He better! Sakura's eyes filled with more tears. Her bloodied teacher refocused on an amused Zabuza and they disappeared in the mist, all colour lost with the exception of the reluctant red.

Gato breathed roughly down her neck, probably pleased Kakashi and Zabuza didn't care about him anymore. He probably thought they had listened to him. Had they? Had Kakashi-sensei?

Could she take him? Sakura's blurry eyes wandered to Gato's ankle. If she kicked back and down at his feet and at the same time pushed away the knife, maybe she could run?

The hired swords behind Gato roared and ran past him, hollering and cheering. Sakura felt Gato's old wrinkly hands grab her arm and he turned around and started running. She had to run too, or the knife would stay in her throat. So she did.

Then an enormous man appeared beside Gato and he looked down at her. His dark eyes locked on hers, daring her to free herself. He had a large broad sword strapped to his back, and instinct told her she wouldn't get away from him.

"Takashi. Bind the girl and bring her to the Hanamachi entertainment district. Mostly unharmed. She's my current life insurance. Get moving!" Gato swore and padded his knife against Sakura's shoulder. The man called Takashi nodded and fished up a long thick rope from his pouch.

"I'm out of this crazy place. Let them all kill each other." Gato hissed as he looked over his shoulder at the chaos on the bridge. Where Naruto and Sasuke were fighting for their lives inside a cage made of ice and mirrors. Where Kakashi fought to protect them, against a monster in the mist.

And what was she doing?

Sakura refused. Anger clouded her mind and she didn't care about the man with the broad sword. As Gato let his knife fall slightly, Sakura quickly made the hand signs for a D-ranked Kawarimi replacement jutsu, as Kakashi had done when the Demon Brothers attacked.

Tora, ushi, inu, mi- ninpo: Kawarimi no jutsu!

She felt herself float through something not quite called the world, space and time meddled with each other, and then she felt the world right itself as she opened her eyes and looked around. She had switched with a kunai she had thrown before, and she was now closer to the bridge. She saw Gato gape at the kunai in the ground, seconds ago where she had been standing.

The man with the broadsword caught on and saw her almost immediately. She had no time to triumph in the feeling of perfectly executing the D-rank jutsu, so she pulled out several kunai and ran along the bridge's edge towards the man who had requested their mission. The hollering hired swords had reached Zabuza and Kakashi, joining in the fight fearlessly and stupidly, eager to see the blood of shinobi. Sakura swirled past a man, tried to balance on the bannister, and ran alongside it.

She had to get to Tazuna. Protect him. Fight.

"Get her!" She could hear Gato yell at Takashi.

"Escaping, are you?" A voice whispered in her ear as she ran on the bridge. A kunai in her hand, Sakura threw it to the voice. Laughing, a woman with honey blond hair cartwheeled away, and drew a large battle club from a scroll. Her sparkling green eyes shone of mischief and ran after the pinkette. Suddenly, Sakura's legs gave out as blinding pain raked through her spine. Falling and tumbling down, she found the kunoichi standing triumphantly in front of Sakura, swinging her club in circles. The man called Takashi had just caught up and nodded to the blond kunoichi. Her legs were on fire. She couldn't move without the lightning of pain striking her legs and she cried out.

"Good job, Yume." Takashi gruffed.

"What do we need her for?" Yume drawled and swung her giant battered club in circles. Sakura gasped as she tried to move again, her quivering hands forcing herself away, crawling with her legs lagging behind. "I'd rather take one of the big guys. I like the one with a sword."

"She is a hostage for Gato-sama. Hatake and Momochi are to preferably kill each other. We are, as you know, needed at Gato-sama's side." Takashi said as he took hold of the crawling and protesting girl, bound Sakura's hands and ankles, and slung her struggling body over his shoulder. "We go to the Hanamachi district directly."

"Sure, honey bear." Yume grinned and glanced longingly to the chaos at the bridge. The hired swords attacked both Zabuza and Kakashi, making it even more difficult for the two parts to battle. Blood was spilt. Screams escaped cut throats. There was just bodies, faces, moving, falling. Who was important? Who fell? Who screamed?

Sakura saw stars blink in her vision and she felt her legs crumble. Takashi ran with her bound and slung over his shoulder, and she couldn't do anything. The last thing she could see was Gato ordering for a high speed transport, barely giving her a look. He had known his bodyguards would catch her.

She lost and woke from consciousness from time to time. First she found herself on a boat, gagged but not blindfolded. She could smell the salty air, hear the seagulls sing and feel the rocking ship crash into waves. Then she passed out as the ship lulled her to sleep. When she woke again, she noticed that her legs had stopped bleeding, and someone had bandaged them. They had swollen to an unnatural size, and Sakura wondered if something had been broken.

Time went by in damp darkness. She was thirsty and hungry, and she really really needed to pee. But none was there with her, so she tried to sleep instead in the basement of the ship. A worried sleep was better than awake agony.

She woke again at the rattling of wheels, the steady thumps of hooves, and she found herself in a dark space. The wood creaked and she figured it was a carriage dragged by horses.

The man called Takashi saw her wake and gave her food and water, removing the gag. She noticed she had been starving and wolfed down the dry fish and dry clumpy rice.

"Where are you taking me?" She tried to ask, her voice hoarse and scratchy. Her legs felt like they were encased in stone - heavy and aching when she moved them. Fractured? "Please let me go-"

"Don't talk." He said solemnly, and left it at that. Silence consumed them and Sakura sighed. His sternly set mouth promised no such thing as an exchange of words between them. After a while, the carriage stopped for a break, and the woman called Yume jumped inside, gave Takashi a kiss on his forehead and then she turned to Sakura.

"It seems your buddies died on the bridge, girlie. Just got the message. None is going to come looking for you, honey. Poor little thing!" Yume said and smiled, sickly sweet. "But we'll find a use for you, don't worry."

Sakura blinked.

"You're lying." Sakura said and quivered. She knew they were alive. Because her teammates were strong. Kakashi-sensei was incredibly strong. She had faith.

"You're lying", she said again and felt tears form in her eyes. They were strong, weren't they?

Had she left them to die?

"Gato-sama's conglomerate Kanpani is large, so we will definitely find a position for you. Didn't go great as a ninja for you anyway, did it?" Yume smirked. Sakura tried to not sob.

"You'll work for food and bedding. Obey, and you won't get in trouble. And… Don't try to escape." Takashi said sternly.

"If you try to escape, I won't just give your legs a fracture. Club-chan will break them. And clipped birds never get far." Yume chuckled happily. "I kind of want to break you though. So fragile. Like my first disciple. So easy to just shatter. Ah, I changed my mind. Pretty please try to escape."

"Yume." Takashi said as a warning.

"Yes, darling. I know. But look at her, do you really think she has the guts to run from us?" She sing-songed and batted an eyelash at Sakura.

"Just don't encourage anything." He sighed.

And in the end, when they arrived at the Hanamachi entertainment building somewhere off the inlands, Sakura thought that Gato was a bigger pain in the ass than she had at first thought.

And that she truly was a useless kunoichi of Konoha.


	2. Clipped Wings and Awful Geishas

**Chapter 2**

 **Clipped Wings and Awful Geishas**

When Sakura arrived to Hanamachi she was assigned the duty of _shikomi_ , a housemaid in the Okiya building which housed the female entertainers. Due to her wounded legs she was dead tired each night after endless mopping of hallways, but since Takashi came to visit everyday and was kind enough to look over the healing (and probably make sure she didn't escape), Sakura's legs worked fine after three days of intense cleaning. The headmistress of Hanamachi, Yukino no Danna, had seen her clean one day and had ordered her to do some kind of exam. It was a dance routine, and when Sakura tried to disobey, Yukino-danna called for Yume. Yume came gladly and stood in the corner of the large hall and swung her club menacingly, and Sakura quickly obeyed.

When Sakura performed the routine, which was weirdly similar to a kata formation she had been taught in the Academy, Yukino-danna had snapped her fan loudly and said that Sakura had passed.

So she was together with a few other girls in a dance class after that, in training to become _minarai._

And that is how Sakura found herself preparing for an official dance show in Hanamachi. Sakura shivered as she dressed herself in the silky pink fabric she had been ordered to don for the night's show. If she had not been held captive in a large entertainment complex, she would have thought the kimono to be cute. The pink lotus flowers decorated the hem of the kimono, sprouting and blooming in its embroided elegance. She felt like ripping it to shreds.

 _Why?_

Mistress Yukino, the old dignified woman that ran the complex as well as the darker side business of the brothel, slapped Sakura's shoulder. The black eyes were sharp, and her perfectly painted red mouth was set in a stern line.

"Remember what I taught you today? Don't make any mistakes. If you do, I'll make you into a Feather girl instead and you'll train to become a _whore_. Yes?"

"Yes, Yukino-danna." Sakura mumbled. The woman sighed and brought her to the backstage of the large screen. Behind the screen, a large hall filled with laughing and drinking people, expectantly looking at the stage.

"Now, let us enjoy the Lotus Girl! With exotic pink hair and innocent eyes _,_ let us applaud our newest addition - the flower of spring!" A male voice boomed from the stage, and Sakura saw a bald man bow to the audience, then slip elegantly away.

A sound of hands clapping made its way to Sakura's ears. Clinking glasses and chatter and laughter. Heavy smoke in the air. Music and the deep sound of its strings from a koto. Sakura breathed through her nose. She glanced at the door leading to the hallway. Two large guards stood on watch, she knew that Yume was in the building, and Sakura shrunk. She could probably not handle them anyway, if she made a run for it.

 **We could.**

Sakura didn't listen to her inner voice.

"You're up." Mistress Yukino hissed at Sakura. Trembling, Sakura strode to the massive white screen. She hesitated behind the protective fabric, not _wanting this, why aren't they coming for me, mom, dad-_

A push made Sakura yelp and stumble out onto the stage and the light blinded her eyes.

Silence in the crowd.

Sakura blinked. The stark lights twinkled like stars and Sakura would rather be where stars slept than at the stage in an entertainment complex. Eyes stared at her, some undressing her, some scrutinising her, some pitiying her.

 **Dance, then, like the puppet you are.**

Sakura swallowed. The notes from the koto quieted down.

 _Breathe_.

The seducing sound of strings being gently plucked echoed around her. Her cue was the bamboo flute which joined in the ensemble.

And Sakura moved, with her fan protecting her lips. The Noh dance was a common theatrical piece, but mistress Yukino had made a few changes to it so it was a simple dance. Sakura moved to the music, and the music flowed through her. But she never truly felt it. She knew the steps by now, she was a fast learner, but all she felt was how infinitely _useless_ the dance was. Just like her.

Abandoned on a lone stage, she forced herself through the steps. A million words engraved in her skin, a failing torch burning in her eyes, and Sakura's dance was one of loneliness. And she was like clumsy feathers in the wind.

When she was done, she felt the tears slip on her cheek. The music died. Silence. Then clutches of the crowd clapped and the atmosphere was strained. Sakura bowed, hid a sob behind her fan, and walked back behind the white screen.

"Mediocre. Do better next time." Mistress Yukino snapped and pushed the girl towards the changing room. "Make yourself useful for once and help out in the kitchen after you've changed."

 _Obey, and you won't get in trouble._

"Yes." Sakura said in a shallow breath and wiped her tears away.

She changed to the more informal waitress outfit and pulled her long hair into a ponytail. Calls from the kitchen made her fasten her pace and a chef greeted her with a tray of saké shoved into her hands. It was the head chef, an old elegant man in his fifties, and he scowled at her. His name was Daiki, Sakura recalled someone calling him.

"Don't spill, darling." He waved her off. "Table seven."

 _Obey, and you won't get in trouble._ She repeated in her mind and grinded her teeth.

Sakura nodded and looked at the table number scribbled on a note on the tray. She quickly made her way through the bar and into the steamy atmosphere of the complex. In the farther corner she found the table she was looking for. Two women gambled at the table and barely looked up when Sakura put the tray down. When she produced the bottle and poured two cups for them, the blond one looked up at her.

"It's all mine." She drawled and looked at the second cup. Sakura blushed and tried not to stare at the purple rhombus on the woman's forehead.

"I'm sorry, m'am." Sakura apologized timidly and poured the saké back into the bottle from the second cup. The blond woman with honey coloured eyes snorted and grabbed the cup, and drank the whole thing. Sakura bowed politely and went back to the kitchen for the next order.

On her way back, someone grabbed her arm. Hesitantly, yet ready to strike, she looked to her left. A burly man with a black curly moustache grinned drunkenly at her and chuckled at her apparent distress. His dark matte blue yukata looked expensive, and his company was two of the Feather girls who beautifully smiled and poured more expensive saké into his cup. Their kimonos exploded with color, their decorated hairdos beautifully set up and their pretty smiles overshadowed Sakura's by far. She guessed they were _maiko_ in training.

"Enchanting performance, eh, Lotus girl!" The older man complimented her and smiled toothily. He had a mole on his eyebrow. She tried not to stare at it. It was disproportionately huge.

"Thank you, sir." Sakura almost stuttered, and looked to the two Feather girls for help. But they only smiled amusedly and chuckled behind their fans. The man tightened his grip on Sakura's biceps and his eyes glinted.

"Let's raise a glass for the Lotus girl!" The man smiled and raised his ceramic cup, followed by a few other guests on the near tables. Sakura blushed as they cheered.

"My name is Umeboshi. Why don't you join us?" He asked and patted the mat next to him.

"I'm sorry sir, but I'm needed in the kitchen to receive further orders." Sakura bowed and was careful to keep her face neutral. She didn't want to show her discomfort.

"Elusive little thing, aren't ya." Umeboshi growled, but then he laughed. "But I do enjoy a bit of resistance. Go to your place in the kitchen, then."

He let her arm go, and Sakura almost stumbled away. The Feather girls quickly started talking with Umeboshi again, apologizing for her impudence.

Sakura's mind was blank as she worked, plastering a fake and bad smile on her glossy lips. The guests were talking constantly, chattering in her ears so she was afraid they'd break. Drinking copious amounts of sake and rakiji made them blush and raise their voices. Sakura hated them. She hated everything.

"... And then… Naruto Bridge! Can you…. How ridiculous…" Sakura caught a voice, hearing it like an explosion in the jumbled mess of music and laughter, and her heart almost stopped. Rushing, almost falling as she ran through the crowded low tables, she found two men talking. Their cups were half full, and she bent down to pour some more into them with her bottle. They ignored her.

"Wave seems to be lost now. The poor village will start raising their prices again- fucking shinobi. Can't believe the villagers afforded to hire them though." The other man growled, twirling a silver ring on his finger.

"I heard it was a massacre at the bridge they're building- a clash between Gato-sama's men and a few shinobi. Luckily Gato-sama escaped!" The other man sweated and wiped his hand over the balding spot on his head.

Sakura bowed her head as she looked at them through the fall of her silky petal hued hair. She felt like her head was about to explode.

 _Please, please._

"Excuse me, gentlemen. I do not mean to disturb, but- I have a sibling in Wave and I worry about her, if shinobi is there she might be in peril. Do you know if the good men Gato-sama hired killed the awful shinobi?"

"Oh, poor soul. No, from what I heard, only a shinobi called Momochi Zabuza fell at the hired swords. Good riddance." The bald man looked up at her and seemed to notice her hair. Sakura's heart beat faster.

 _They are alive._

"Lotus girl!" The man squelched and blinded her with a white toothy smile.

"Thank you, sir, for the information." She mumbled and withdrew with another bow, before he could suggest a private dance. It had happened several times during the evening, and she didn't want more situations like that. Her smile was true, however, the rest of the night. A weight she hadn't known to rest on her chest had lifted. She almost forgot she was held captive as she joked with the guests and earned a few extra coins.

The night crawled into the late hours and the guests started to trickle out of the Hanamachi building. Sakura was exhausted, but happy and her dress was dirty, due to a drunk man spilling his whole bottle of rice wine on her. Her feet were sore and blisters had started bleeding between her toes due to the too small shoes. But they _were alive._ Team seven survived the bridge. And they had even named it after Naruto! Sakura could almost not believe it. That loud mouthed brat?

Sakura slept together with three other girls in the cramped space of their cot in the Okiya house, girls that never talked to her and probably saw her as another stranger. Their hushed whispers annoyed Sakura, but she tried instead to zoom them out. The girls had probably been smuggled there and worked as Feather girls, training to become _maiko_ , in the entertainment building.

Finally, the whispers died down and Sakura could sleep. Her dreams were bleached white and boring for once, and she slept peacefully.

The next day Sakura was awakened by Gyakkō, the establishment's right hand to Mistress Yukino and a fully finished _geiko_.

"Get up, you lazy bean." Gyakkō said smoothly and snatched Sakura's blanket away. She unlocked the chain to Sakura's ankle going to her bed with a click. The pink haired girl, sleepy eyed and dull, nodded and slipped out of her nightgown and into a simple grey yukata. It was long, the hem fluttering at her ankles, like the more traditional one she had worn the day before. The other girls weren't in their beds, and had probably gone to bathe and lather themselves in the famous lavender soap Hanamachi was famous for, and prepared for the work in the night.

They practiced the whole day in a closed off garden behind the building, and in the evening she was to perform on the stage once again. Sakura was agile and had a hum of musical rhythm since it was similar to her taijutsu training, so it went well.

"You're up soon. Remember the swirl with a one two rhythm." Gyakkō opened the door to the changing room and Sakura nodded and pulled on her pink yukata, with the help of Gyakkō to fasten the rosette at her back.

After the dance she was greeted with more applause than the day before, and Gyakkō gave her a small nod of acknowledgement, and somehow, Sakura smiled. She had done something good. In a cheerful mood, she washed her long hair in the washbin and her smile was glued to her lips. She hummed a jolly tune.

Sasuke-kun, Kakashi-sensei and Naruto-baka were alive. All she needed to do now was to escape. _But how?_

After the dance and her change to the waitressing yukata, she saw the same two women she had seen the night before at the gambling table once again. When she arrived with their sake she heard the black haired woman whisper loudly to the blond honey eyed woman.

"Tsunade-sama, we should quit for the night. The money is dwindling and-"

"Shut it, Shizune. I'm about to win, I just know it. I can feel it in my gut."

Shizune sat back and frowned, helplessly shrugging her shoulders. She went on to pat a pig in her lap, worrying her lips. Sakura's eyes widened at the name. A memory from one of Iruka-sensei's lessons resounded inside her mind.

 _Senju Tsunade, one of the great Sannin. An incredible medic nin and with the strength of mountains, she was once one of the most famous shinobi of Konoha during the Third Shinobi War._

Sakura thought fast. While she served the cups, she wrote a short note on the paper with the table number.

 _I've been captured, please help._

 _Haruno Sakura, Genin of Konoha_

She slipped it upside down on the table, and the blond woman noticed it immediately. Sakura bowed and went for the next order, feeling her heart beat inside her chest.

After 30 minutes she received another order from table seven. Sakura nervously made her way to the table and poured yet another cup for the blond woman called Tsunade. She felt the Sannin's gaze bore into her neck.

Sakura received nothing in return. Not a note, not even a whisper. With a heavy lump in her throat, she quickly went back to the kitchen. As she felt for the pen to write down the next order, she felt a paper piece in her pocket. She hadn't even noticed! Quickly, she put it in the hem of her kimono.

The rest of the night went on in a blur of yells and laughter and the stink of alcoholic breaths. Sakura was exhausted as she cleaned up the tables after closing time. The other waitresses had left her with mopping duty, so it was two o'clock in the night when she finished.

Sakura sank into bed without bothering to wash up, and she stretched her tired joints. Gyakkō fastened her chains and went away to her own chambers.

Even though she was dead tired and her mouth throbbed due to all the fake smiles, she was excited. When the lights went out, she reached for the small piece of paper she had received from the legendary Sannin. Excitement bubbled in her chest and she read it in the moonlight from the small window above her bed.

 _If you can't even escape by yourself, then maybe you should stay a dancer._

 _T_

Sakura cried as she crumpled the cruel paper in her hand. She couldn't escape, she was too weak! She needed help!

If it had been her team, she didn't doubt they'd leap to her aid. They always had. Why did this woman, a legendary Sannin of Konoha, not do the same?

 **We're a shinobi, for god's sake. The security guards are probably chakra-less.** **We should be able to escape this dirty place.**

 _But how?_ Sakura wailed to her inner voice as she cried into her pillow. _I can't, I just can't. I don't know where I am, there are eyes everywhere, and that woman Yume is in the building. I can't._

 **Drown in self pity, then.**

The next day she noticed a handsome man stare at her during her whole performance. He had pale smooth skin, raven black hair and the most beautiful nut brown eyes. After the performance, he stood up to applaud her, being followed by the rest of the whole establishment. He made everyone give her standing ovations. Sakura blushed and bowed, her fan fluttering like the batting of wings in front of her face.

When she left the stage, she saw the Feather girls' from her cot skimp up the handsome man, giggling like children. Sakura almost snorted.

"You, there!" A young sommelier howled at Sakura as she went to change into the waitress outfit. She stopped and looked at the man, and sweat glistened on his bald head. She racked through the names she had been taught. Gorou?

"Yes, Gorou-sama?" Sakura said and saw his flustered face fall into a quick complacent smile at the honorable noun. Then he seemed to remember his urgent message as he stressed through the words.

"Listen, lotus girl or whatever. I can't really believe this, but the son of the _Katsuotaki_ family has requested _your_ presence at his private _lounge._ Oh, god. He's filthy rich and has lots of power. This is huge. He's never requested a dancer before. Don't fuck this up, sweetie, get in his good graces." The sommelier Gorou growled and pushed her over to the dressing room. "Yukino will apply some more of the white powder shit and make you look presentable. Hurry!"

Sakura confusedly stumbled into the dressing room, where she was met by a puff of white powder into her face. Mistress Yukino wasted no time and gripped Sakura's cheek to apply bright red lipstick.

"Pout!" She ordered haughtily and Sakura obeyed. "His name is Katsuotaki Ito, and you will make no mistakes with him. He's an important guest and has the money to do anything. Don't ask about his father, they have a strained relationship. Don't stutter, speak clearly and no staring. Don't be rude. Don't talk about the weather, he appreciates meaningful conversations. Understood, Haruno? Yes?"

"Y-yes, Danna."

The palm of Yukino's hand came out of nowhere and smacked Sakura's cheek. It stung.

"What did I tell you about stuttering?" Yukino said icily. "Do anything he says, or there will be repercussions. Yes?"

"Understood." Sakura smiled back, and she hoped her eyes burned through Yukino's face. She had to smile, smile. The older woman ordered a _shikomi_ girl to provide her with an obi, and Yukino tied the ornate sash around Sakura's waist and knotted it at the back.

"We'll get a lot of money for this private session. He is very generous if he is pleased with you, even if you are only a _minarai_. Again, do you understand?"

Sakura nodded, but wondered if she really understood. She wasn't a Feather girl, it wasn't in her line of work. They couldn't possibly request a twelve year old to-

No. It couldn't be.

Flustered and out of breath, she was forced into the private lounge. As luxurious as the Hanamachi establishment was, the private lounge was simple and only lit by candles. A low traditional table was set in the middle of the room, with steaming tea cups ordered in a circle. The handsome man, Ito, seemed to be in his twenties and he gracefully went up from his seiza posture and greeted her. He wore a velvet blue yukata and his smile sent her heart to race. His brown eyes were like smooth chocolate, and his smile was god-like.

 _He's very attractive._

"Sakura-san." He said gently. "It is such a pleasure you could join me. Please sit."

"Thank you for inviting me, Katsuotaki-san." Sakura said and smiled.

"Please, you can call me Ito." He purred.

A man she hadn't noticed before sat beside Ito, and he nodded at her. He didn't even introduce himself, only sipping at his sake cup.

 _Rude._

"I was captured by your performance." Ito said and smiled almost shyly. "I thought I wanted to get to know you better. And not in a traditional setting. Please sit down."

Sakura didn't really know what to say so she only nodded, smiled and tried to gracefully sit down.

"I'm sorry for so impudently asking for your presence. I am sure you have more important things to do than sit and drink tea with me." Ito said and scratched his head. Sakura almost laughed.

"You saved me from another night of working as a waitress in the bar, Ito-san, so I am glad you requested me." She replied smoothly.

"Then I won't worry about you not wanting to be here, then." Ito nodded his head.

Sakura thoroughly enjoyed the company of Katsuotaki Ito. He was funny, charming and extremely polite. They chatted for what felt like a minute, but a knock on the door proved that the two hour limit had passed.

 _I don't want to go back there._

Sakura felt her eyes turn hotter, and she quickly looked down on her tea cup, letting a curtain of cotton candy hair fall in front of her eyes.

 _This is my chance._

"Is everything alright?"

"N-no, actually. I want to get out of here, Ito-san." She whispered.

He frowned and thought for a second, then he looked up at her through the fall of his raven colored bangs.

"I will take you away." He promised her, taking her hand in his. "To the most beautiful place in Ta no Kuni. You can stay for awhile with me, if you want to."

"Thank you!" Sakura squealed happily, her cheeks flushed red. _A free pass to get out!_

"I have a spare yukata in the luggage. It was for my sister, but I believe it will suit you better." He said and waved to his assistant, who went and got a beautiful yukata from the wardrobe. He gave it to Sakura with a jerky nod.

The fabric was lush with the color of mint green and the silk ran through her hands like water. It was expensive.

"This is too much- your sister-"

"Sakura-chan, it is fine. I want you to wear it. It's from my trip to Sand country."

Sakura bit her lip hesitantly, and suddenly Ito's hand gripped her shoulder. His eyes bore into hers, and his grin was almost feral.

" _I_ _insist._ " He said sweetly. Sakura nodded, feeling something twist in her gut, telling her to run. But he was a nice man! He just- weirded her out, that's all.

His companion, the mediocre looking assistant, looked down.

"Ieyasu. Take the girl outside through the backdoor after she has finished changing. I will take care of things with Yukino no Danna." Ito asked his assistant.

"Yes, Ito-sama." Ieyasu nodded grimly. Sakura followed the assistant with her heart beating loudly in her chest. After changing into the expensive yukata from Sunagakure, Sakura was sneaked outside. Ieyasu showed her to an alley with three carriages and horses, ordering Ito's people around for departure. Sakura was showed to the carriage in the middle and was left alone.

After a little while, Ito peeked inside the carriage.

"I fixed things with Yukino no Danna. Stay here for the trip, Sakura-san." Ito smiled at her and patted her head. "We'll be there in two hours. You can get some sleep while we ride."

"Yes, Ito-san." Sakura smiled.

The interior of the carriage was luxurious and a silver plate of grapes and been set out for her. After thirty minutes, Sakura fell to the desire of a grape. Munching on one grape, Sakura couldn't believe her luck. There was a feeling of unease deep in her stomach, but she waved it away as nervousness. When they arrived at Ito-san's household she would sleep there for a night, and then travel back to Konoha. Smoothing out the silk yukata Ito-san had given her, she smiled.

A man suddenly hopped inside her carriage, and she recognised him as Ito's assistant. What was his name- Ieyasu?

"Did you eat any grapes?" He asked, his voice soft as he gave her a nice smile.

Sakura frowned.

"Yes, but only one. Do you want some too? There's plenty-"

"Spit it out." Ieyasu said quickly, and only now she saw the sweat glisten on his throat.

Sakura shivered. Why was his voice so hostile? She did spit it out in a handkerchief she found, wondering if she wasn't allowed to eat them. Maybe they were his?

"They are filled with paralysation liquid." He said and looked over his shoulder. Then his eyes became darker.

"What-" Sakura turned around to scream for help.

A hard thunk at the back of her head, and her eyes blinked as she fell face first. Arms caught her and she heard someone mutter 'sorry', and then Sakura passed out.


	3. Dark Abyss

**Chapter 3 - Dark Abyss**

"What-" Sakura murmured and felt dizzy as she tried to locate herself. She was moving. Trees circled above her head. Gasping, she looked up to see a man carrying her. Struggling she succeeded in punching his cheek and he let her go as he yowled in pain.

"You-" she gasped as she tried to get off the ground. The man quickly took a hold of her hand and dragged her away, and she stumbled after him.

"Ito bought you." Ieyasu said and dragged her hand. "Come on, we have to run. They'll notice soon."

"Stop! What are you doing? I don't believe you." Sakura struggled in his grip.

"Fuck, I'm just trying to save your ass! If you don't believe me then fine, go back and join his sex dolls collection." Exasperated, his shoulder sank and he let go of her hand. "I don't know why I did this for you anyway. It's not like you're prettier than any other girl he's bought."

"What? Why- why'd he buy _me_?" Sakura cried out.

"He liked your hair." He said and bit his lip. "Said it'd fit in his collection. Come on, run with me."

"I don't understand…" Sakura said as she sped up and joined his light jog into the darkness of the forest.

"I can't be with Ito anymore, I can't work for him. I used to be his friend, and he was okay before- when we were children. He was always a weird kid, but he was alright. Then he started acting stranger, the relationship with his father got worse, and I found an animal cemetery in the backyard of the Family Mausoleum. That should have been a warning, but I ignored it and called it a phase. He played with dogs, birds and cats, killed them, and buried them." He muttered, his breath jagged. "Then he started to-"

Ieyasu looked down in shame. "He started to take girls into his chambers. After awhile, they never came out."

Sakura felt bile gather in her throat. That man- Ito, really was like that? She almost couldn't believe it- but she did. Somehow.

"This time, I couldn't let him do it. He has never taken little young girls like you before." Ieyasu sighed. Sakura felt a sudden wave of trust fill her body. She believed him, all the warning signs she had noted with Ito had been true. He was not a kind man, after all.

"I'm going to the port in Ishiwake. I have some friends there. You can call for whoever you need to when we get there." Ieyasu said.

"Thank you." Sakura whispered, and he smiled. Sakura noticed that his eyes were a warm nut brown colour. The smile was crooked and he had dimples in his cheeks. Sakura's heart fluttered and her chest tightened.

"We should run lightly from now-"

A whirl in the wind was all warning she got before two kunai embedded into Ieyasu's eyes, busting the balls and exploding in grit and flesh. Flailing his arms in a scream that rose goosebumps on Sakura's arms, he fell to the forest floor when a third kunai shot into his chest, and the scream stopped. Sakura stared in shock at the man's body. He didn't move. There was blood spurting from his eyes, and the two kunai morbidly stuck into his skull.

"Ieyasu!" She screamed and before she could think she was at his side, and checked for a pulse. There was none. The girl cursed as another wave in the air disturbed her stressed thoughts and she rolled out of the way of more kunai scattering into the ground. Scrambling away, she had to get away, and ran through the forestation, not knowing where she was going, but she needed to get away from the unknown threat.

 _Ieyasu-san is dead! He's dead! He's-_

She ran. Without noticing, a slow mist started to cover the murky forest, and she could barely see three foot in front of her. Then she was in the middle of a mist and Sakura met a man with blue eyes.

 _Ito's guard?_

The two knives he had were sharp and long, holding the handles so the blades pointed downwards- in a reverse grip. His blue eyes were wild and paranoid, his attire dirty and bloody. His body was shivering, and it seemed his skin was flecked with pink spots. Was he ill?

"How did you find me so fast?" He yelled, his voice hoarse. Sakura frowned and felt her tears dry on her cheek. He was the one who had killed Ieyasu-san, and she didn't recognise him from Ito's guards. He was an unknown enemy. Why had he killed Ieyasu?

"What do you want?" Sakura shouted. The man's wild eyes thinned and he scrutinised her.

"Don't act innocent, Suna kunoichi. It's about what you want, isn't it? Well, I'm not going to let go of it. And I'm not letting you go back to report." The man yelled and his breathing was ragged, as if he had been running for days.

Sakura watched him warily, and the man made a few hand seals with his knives in his mouth, too fast for her to see in the dark forest. A plume of smoke rose from the man's hands, and then they were on fire. The girl tried to feint as the man attacked in a whirl of slashing and burning knives, but she was not quick enough as his right knife grazed her back. It burnt the fabric quickly, leaving a harsh burn mark on her back. Sakura arched her neck in pain, but she had no time for pain, she had to _move._ She had to run, a man with burning knives was too much for her.

Sakura mindlessly fell into an offensive kata, and when he went for her she dove and kicked at his feet, which failed as he side stepped her attack. The burning knives almost severed her long hair as she tried to evade another barrage of slashes. Sakura felt sweat drip down the bridge of her nose as she frantically went through different strategies of fighting against an assailant with knives.

 _Strike at the throat, to damage the trachea of the assailant and disrupting their breathing._

Sakura stepped under his guard, aimed her elbow up and striked hard.

 _Your elbow is solid bon_ e, _and you'll get a lot of power by striking with it._

The man choked as Sakura's elbow left a harsh bruise on his throat, and he dropped his knives as his fingers went to his trachea. Sakura quickly kicked him in the groin as she saw medical green chakra lit up his fingers as he coughed, then he doubled over after Sakura's well aimed kick to the genital area.

Then the clone poofed away, and she was kicked down from behind.

 _A clone._

"No more games, Suna." His voice said hoarsely. Sakura didn't have time to retreat as his fingers sneaked around her throat, and in a second she was held up in the air like a ragdoll.

His choke hold on her throat made her see stars and her arms flailed at her sides.

 _No! Not like this! Please..._

"Time to die, you Suna twat." The man growled. Sakura couldn't breath and suddenly, a deep raging hatred poured into her heart. Hate for life being so fragile, like glass, but she wouldn't shatter like it. She wouldn't break. Her arms regained some sort of strength, maybe her last, and she gripped his wrists. The man didn't bat an eye as he squeezed the life out of her. Her grip was so weak anyway. She was losing too much oxygen, her hands wavered, her eyes bloodshot and she opened her mouth.

 _I'm not glass._

 **Chakra. Focus.**

Sakura pumped her molten gold through her veins and tenketsu points and focused _all of it_ to her hands, her palms, her fingertips, on his wrists. She gurgled.

 _Break._

And all of her chakra molded, pointed, shot out from her and into the man's arms and everything _exploded._ Blood splattered on her face and ran down her throat. Her hands burned and blisters popped up on her palms as if on fire, and she could see what her chakra had coiled and destroyed. The man's arm was no more, a lump of flesh ending at the elbow.

She had no chakra left. Drained and exhausted she fell to the ground and breathed and breathed and breathed. The man screamed as his right arm hung in strands of tendons and bones poking out, his half destroyed left arm trying to stop the blood flow uselessly.

"You-" he gurgled, and his eyes were frantic as he started searching his pockets for more weapons with his good hand.

But he wasn't dead, he was still _dangerous._

And then in a moment of clarity, Sakura remembered his two knives that had fallen down before. Reaching down to her boot, she flipped one up, pain seething in her hands but she bit it down, held it like the man did his knives, and with all her strength she hacked at him.

Her hand had been shaking, but the cool, familiar feel of the metal beneath her fingers brought back the endless conditioning of the Academy. She hadn't understood the countless hours of what seemed like mindless practice then, but now she did. Her body knew this, even if her mind lagged behind.

As the knife met his skin, Sakura shoved. Blood spurted from the wound, and the man blinked in the middle of a scream that stopped short. Sakura never let go of the death grip she had on the knife and she unceremoniously fell on top of him.

Her hand quivered as the kitchen knife sunk deeper into the man's chest, puncturing his lung. It bubbled. Sakura's ears rang with the sound of his breath escaping through the wound. He gurgled and his eyes were fierce as they bulged in pain. He was an ugly, ugly man, but his eyes were a beautiful sky blue colour, with tiny flecks of gold around the iris. Sakura stared at him.

Suddenly his left hand shot forward and grabbed her neck, and he pulled her violently into his face. Sakura was shocked as his mouth smacked on hers and he opened her mouth and his slimy bloody tongue shot into her. A hard round shape slid across her gum from his mouth and then she violently pushed the man down, teary eyed and shocked and disgusted. Unknowingly she swallowed the bile in her throat, but also the thing, the hard shape the man had spit into her mouth.

"Happy nightmares, bitch." The man gurgled and Sakura, in blind rage for stealing her first kiss, for filling her mouth with blood, for making her feel like dirt, for everything in the world, she grabbed the knife's handle and twisted, and dragged it up his ribcage. Blood spurted, flesh parted and his blue beautiful eyes went blank. And she had no regrets as she killed a man for the first time.

Sakura only waited for him to blink. But all that was left of the man was the blood pulsing from his chest, making his shirt go dark brown. She heard as his bowel let go of his shit. And then she could smell it. An acrid and filthy stench.

He didn't move.

Snot ran down her lips and blended with the blood and saliva from the man. Sakura sat there, cried and looked up at the night sky. There were no stars. The sky was just as empty as her. None was there to comfort her. There was only her and a dead man and a lot of blood and a stolen first kiss.

Remorse at what she had done suddenly filled her and she vomited besides the dead man. _She had killed a man!_ The vomit splashed on the grass, slimy and bits and pieces gathered at the dead man's elbow. She hacked and coughed but there was only yellow gaule jumping up from her gut. Frowning and crying, she wiped her mouth. Staring at the dead man, she couldn't move. It was like she had been glued to the forest floor, and the world weighed her down, and the dead man was her only anchor to the ground.

 **Death is ugly, after all.**

Sakura heard the voice inside her head, but she ignored it. The voice she called Inner. The voice who had destroyed every childhood friendship. Alienated her mother and father from her. They had taken her to mentalists, who had all silently diagnosed her with a split personality disorder, but which her parents had paid off to go unseen, a diagnosis that never existed. That had all come down to her parents being glad when she discovered chakra, because then she was sent off the to Academy. A weight had lifted off their shoulders.

And the voice had all but broken her, always. But it also healed her. Given her comfort. One thing was true; in that she was never alone. But even now, with a corpse touching her collapsed knees, she felt more alone than ever. Even Inner felt so far away.

She looked down on the limp body. The world kept turning, but his didn't. She couldn't move. All she could do was to stare at him. Did he have a family? A lover? Would they miss him?

Sakura shook her head, remembering Iruka-sensei's lesson on a shinobi's first kill. Different mind techniques one could use, to make it easier. Iruka had never talked about his first kill, but Sakura recalled his slight twitch of the eye as he talked about the mind techniques. He remembered his. The girl tried to look at the body and see it as the enemy it was, but all she could really see was a man that had had his own dreams, his own loyalties. He was just like her. And she hated him, but at the same time she understood him.

She didn't know how long she sat there and cried and punched the man's limp body and screamed at the sky. She was at loss of what to do. She had killed a man. And he had kissed her. And, and… Sakura blinked. It hadn't been a tooth which he had forced her to swallow. It must have been a pill of some sort, because Sakura felt the world spin around her. The leaf next to her seemed to grow in front of her eyes, and she saw stars in the forest, and the dead man blinked his pretty blue eyes at her. Sakura felt panic rise in her throat. If it was a suicide pill...

"Someone, help me…" Sakura wailed as the world changed before her eyes. She was going to die. Something warm and steaming ran down her legs. Clumsily and disoriented, she tried to get up, but her legs wouldn't listen, ashamed and afraid and helpless-

Sakura blinked and the contracting world was no more.

* * *

A sound woke her up and a migraine welcomed her from her nightmares. Grumbling, Sakura scratched her head. It had been the worst nightmare of her life. Dreaming so extensively hadn't happened for a while. Sakura squeezed her eyes but she couldn't see anything in the darkness of her room. It was cold. Sakura shivered as she licked her dry chapped lips. A cup of hot matcha tea, a hug from her mom and maybe a dango stick or two would be heaven-

"He's not alive. The bastard, what about the drug?"

"Shit. Double-shit. Ana is going to have a fucking fit."

"Oh, right. Ana and Yuji had a thing going on didn't they?"

"Yeah. She'll want that dead girl's head on a spike. Now, where's the precious drug?"

Dark baritone voices startled her and Sakura let out a shrill scream. When she blinked her eyes again, shapes and forms emerged from the darkness. When she turned her head, sapphire eyes met hers. The dead man stared at her and Sakura shot off the ground, growling as her body ached and searching for a kunai. It had all been real. _Shit, shit._

Four men stood in front of her and one of them inspected the man she had killed. White cloth covered the man farthest away, a short and slender black haired boy stood next to her, a green haired man watched her and a tanned man walked up to the dead man. Drawing back from the corpse she trembled. _Too many._

"Oh, the girl's alive. Taro, take care of her." The man with a white cloth covering half his face ordered. A short boy took a step towards her, but was interrupted when the tanned man cursed.

"Yuji doesn't have it." The tanned man inspecting the body said in a shrill voice, and he let go of the dead man's slack jaw. He had been inspecting his teeth.

"Maybe she stole it, Wakishi-taichou." The green haired man said icily and he blocked Sakura's escape, surrounding her together with the tanned man and the small black haired one. She felt like prey surrounded by hungry wolves.

"Step back!" She yelled and her bloody hands held up her kunai protectively. She was trembling.

"Apprehend her." The man with a white cloth covering his face said, his hand jerking towards her with a pointed finger. His fingernails were yellow and too long.

Power surged through her: if it was overconfidence, fear or survival instinct, she didn't know.

Sakura saw the man with green hair flex his fingers, and in the next second she rolled on the ground, spikes of steel hammering into the ground where she had just stood. Quickly, Sakura went through the hand seals for the underground jutsu Kakashi had used in the bell test.

" _Doton: Shinjū Zanshu no Jutsu!"_ She whispered, released her fingers and took a deep breath, as she dove into the earthy forest floor. Inside a world of mud, squirming worms and darkness, Sakura had to rely solely on the feeling of the enemies chakras above her head. It wouldn't take long for them to find her, and she couldn't hold her breath for too long. The closest chakra presence she could feel was to her right, and she forced her chakra to disrupt the gravel and make way for her, and she dug a quick tunnel to the chakra signature above her head.

Right underneath the man, she located his feet. In a breath, her kunai slid up through the ground and slit the man's tendon at the heel of his foot.

A muffled scream later, and Sakura was about to dive further back down again but was disrupted by the feeling of something tugging her hair. In a movement, her head snapped back as someone grabbed her hair and forced her body up from the ground's innards. Hanging only by her hair, Sakura screamed and wriggled, which only caused her more pain.

 _I should have run. I should have survived. I'm so stupid!_

The green haired man held her and his eyes were dark, his pupils wide and his breath was short. A man lay on the ground, trying to not scream as he bound his ankle with bandages. It was the short dark haired one.

"Bitch. Hiding like a mole in the ground, huh?" The green haired man spat in her face. Sakura felt her hair strain and some roots snapped off. His hands smelled like fish. "You fucker, why'd you kill Yuji, huh?"

Sakura gasped as his breath was too close, _too close_.

"Wait, don't kill her." The white clothed man said in a chill tone. "We'll take her back to the southern hideout for interrogation. She must have been sent from Suna to get back the drug, just look at the yukata. The fabric is famous in Suna. She might have hidden the drug on her body."

"This little thing? She's barely Genin. Look, she's pissed herself, I can smell it." The green haired man questioned. Sakura saw stars before her eyes as the pain from him holding her hair and her whole weight grew numbing.

"Doesn't matter. Maybe she was a tracker and Yuji found her before she could run back to a Suna troop. I don't understand how she could kill him though, must have been pure luck." The tanned man said in his high tone voice. Sakura blinked. Suna? "But she sure did butcher him. Man, look at that arm. It's shredded."

"I don't think she's from Suna." The white clothed man called Wakishi said quietly as he discerned her hanging struggling body. "Not tanned, and her accent sounds rather Fire country to me."

"Speculating won't give us anything." The short boy Sakura had wounded wheezed as he put pressure with a white bandage to his ankle. It filled with blood stains. "Let's just bring her to the facility."

"Taro, can you walk?" Wakishi asked coolly.

"In a minute. Just need to release a bit o' healing chakra from the cursed seal." He wheezed and Sakura caught a glimpse of something glowing at the short boy's neck.

"Be careful with that." The tanned man reprimanded the boy called Taro.

"I know, taichou. I've practiced, haven't I?" He smirked through the pain.

"Oh look, she's passing out."

And Sakura felt the world drain like water from her vision, and the darkness of raindrops washed her away.

* * *

The scent of sea salt hung in the air, and Sakura felt her mint green kimono cling to her body in the humid air. As she blinked and stretched, a weight on her throat made her hands wander to it. A choker made of dark grey metal was clasped around her throat, and she felt the buzzing power in it. Her chakra seemed to be held back by it. After trying to wriggle it loose, she understood it was useless. The sense of no chakra was suffocating, and it felt like she had lost a limb. She felt so spitefully weak she almost cursed loudly.

Sakura stared into darkness. Disoriented and slightly nauseous, she tried to get up from the floor. Her fingers deftly searched the ground which was cold and stony, to a small futon, and to the wall behind her. Wet rock. She wasn't on a ship, then.

Sakura muffled a helpless scream as she realised after a small walk around in the room she was in, that she was in some kind of cell. Her deft fingers found something similar to a glass wall to her right. She found the metal door next to it and there was no handle on it. After banging on it and screaming her lungs out for help, she gave up. Bonelessly she sank to the floor.

Sakura sat down and cried, and tasted her salty tears on her chapped lips. It was impossible to escape. She couldn't use her chakra, and there were no loopholes in the cell, not even a crack in the stones. A migraine thumped against her skull, like bees angrily buzzing and flitting inside her scalp.

Wherever she was, she knew it wasn't an official capture. There were protocols to follow in cases such as capture, but if they didn't even know she was a Konohagakure ninja… Sakura suddenly missed her headband. Mistress Yukino had taken it and thrown it away. Thrown away her only item which showed where she belonged.

And who was she now, without her headband? An escapee dancer? A useless, clueless girl? None? Then why had they taken her? Who were _they_?

Sakura sniffed and felt herself fall into an abyss of self pity and identity questioning. If her capturers knew she was from Konoha, would they let her go? Somehow, she doubted it. When she heard them speaking of the drug, it had seemed like they believed her to be a Suna shinobi trying to get it back. It also meant they had no problem trying to kill a Suna shinobi. The drug, she recalled, must have been very important if they thought Suna was after it. The man she had killed- and Sakura had to close her eyes as she remembered pretty blue eyes, blankly staring at the star less sky, and she swallowed harshly.

She couldn't think about that now. What was important was _why_ they had captured her. Possibly it was the pill, the stolen drug, the man had made her swallow. The one drug a group of four men was looking for. The drug that a Suna shinobi force could have been looking for.

Why was it important? Sakura dully remembered her experience when she had thought it to be a suicide pill. The world had distorted before her eyes- and she had seen _things._

Sakura shivered. She had almost nothing to go on except for the drug in her body. Was it a temporary drug? Did the things she had seen before collapsing on a dead man been real, or did they have something to do with the pill?

The men who had caught her hadn't worn a headband, so she had no idea who they were or what they wanted. Their accents had been bland and a mix of different dialects, making it difficult for her to know where they were from. Mercenaries?

Sakura curled up in a corner of the dark cell and counted her heartbeats.

The sensation of something moving inside her stomach made her freeze. Sakura looked down on her abdomen, pulled up her shirt and she saw, _she saw,_ something bulge and roll and crawl on her inside. Touching her stomach, she felt it _kick._

 _What is that?_

Bile rose in her throat and she puked. The pretty cake she had eaten a day ago in the private lounge together with Ito splurged out her throat. The pink and white vanilla mush spread on the floor and she hulked and vomited again. She did so until all she could vomit was yellow gaul. Her throat swelled and became dry and acrid.

Her stomach bulged again. Whatever was inside her didn't come out. With fear she watched a form move beside her navel and it looked like _a centipede._ Inside her stomach _._

Sakura screamed.

"Kai!" She tried in a frenzy and her fingers were clamped together in the release seal, but it didn't stop moving. "Kai! Kai!" She tried again and again and again. But it wouldn't stop slithering inside her ribcage.

 _What is happening?_

The door creaked open and Sakura wasted no time. She crawled up to the glass wall which lit up with a fluorescent light, casting a shadow of two figures behind the glass.

"Please!" She cried. "Please take out the centipede! I'll tell you anything, just take it _out! Take it out!"_

"It would seem that the hallucinogen is working. I still don't understand why the subject swallowed it though." A female voice drifted behind the glass, and Sakura clawed her fingernails on the glass.

"Good that it is in effect." Another voice, the scribbling of what sounded like a pencil to a paper. "Oh. Seems it soiled itself."

And Sakura felt it but she didn't care about the hotness of shame burning its mark on the floor and her legs.

"Please get it out!" She begged. It was still crawling inside her.

"This is just the beginning, sweetie." The female voice drifted to her ears, and the clacking of shoes, the shutting of the door, the turning off the lights, left Sakura alone in the dark again.

After a while, the centipede stopped moving. Maybe it slept, maybe it had died. Either way, Sakura was glad it didn't make itself known anymore. She walked in circles around the cell, restless and afraid. Anxious, mostly, due to the pill in her body and it affects.

 _This is only the beginning, sweetie._

She recalled the female doctor's voice saying, and paranoia gripped her in humid coldness. Sakura was alone, and fear was her only companion. Then, she started to see more things in the dark, and nothing was ever the same.

* * *

 **Author's Note:**  
Hello!

Thought I'd answer some reviews!

 **vanilaoverchocolate:** No, Sakura still had her chakra when she was caught by Gato's thugs. Her legs were crushed at that time however, and she couldn't run because of it. When in the Hanamachi building, Takashi and Yume keeps her on a short leash. Also, Sakura is incredibly afraid, and she has no self-confidence whatsoever. She at first thinks her comrades died, and is locked up by the feeling of uselessness. Even when she finds out Naruto and co. are alive, she is still in that dark place where she thinks that she's useless. She's used to being saved by Naruto and Sasuke, which has damaged her sense of being capable. I hope that answers it!

 **LovingPillow:** Sakura is really trusty, and I wanted to do the classic Disney shit with prince charming coming in to save her, and then it turns out that maybe he wasn't all that nice... And maybe the dorky/fumbling assistant could be more than just that? Lol anyway. Sakura just wants to get out, and she doesn't trust herself to be able to do it, so she'd rather trust a stranger to help her. It might sound strange, but she'll get better, promise!

 **Obi** : Thanks for a long review! I agree that Sakura had extraordinary chakra control when she was a child, but she didn't have ny natural strength (that could compare to Naruto or Sasuke). My version of Sakura is in a constant state of fear, and she has no trust in herself. She has always relied on her team to save her, so she hasn't had to fend for herself before. She's smart, but anyone can be dumbed down by fear. But don't worry, if you continue to read you'll see that Sakura can transition into something stronger! Or well, not Mary Sue, and not like Naruto or Sasuke. A stronger version of herself, with her own abilities being polished.

Any more questions? I'll answer them in the A/N!

Cheers


	4. Abandoned

**Chapter 4 - Abandoned**

Time went by, counting heartbeats, and they visited sometimes - very irregularly. First they gave her new clothes, and made her strip naked in front of them. She had been embarrassed, but too afraid to deny them. Hot shame had flushed her and she quickly changed. They gave her grey trousers and a grey shirt. To make her feel even more empty and lose more of her colour.

She was sick, that much she knew. The itching beneath the skin, the aching of her bones. But she couldn't understand her symptoms and she couldn't state a diagnosis.

She saw things. Things in the dark. She didn't know what it was, but it definitely had something to do with the man she had killed. She was dull eyed and her expression resigned as she inspected her wounds from her fight with the man she had-

Sakura closed her eyes. The man she had killed.

Her hand unconsciously went to her hair, reaching for comfort, for something _normal_ , but found nothing. Sakura blinked. Right. They had shaved her head. Her pale petal hued locks had fallen away to the dirt and the careless cuts on her scalp from the scissor's edge burned and itched still. She had somehow forgotten. She scratched her buzz cut scalp instead, the dune like feathery hair was matted by sweat and grime.

They visited mostly to observe her after that, but sometimes they gave her injections. She could never struggle, because if she did then large men came inside her cell and beat her down. They were scary, she admitted to herself, and not because of their deadly fists. Their skin was white, an unnatural paleness tinged with bluish nuances, and their mouths had been sewn shut. Their eyes looked decomposed, as if they were blind. They wore long white robes, or what had probably been white once. It seemed the blood on their robes couldn't be washed away. She referred to them as the Nikuya, _butchers_ , because that was probably their profession as they butchered her every time she said _no._

If she had counted her own heartbeats correctly, she had been held in the cell for three days. She got bowls of overcooked rice porridge twice a day, a slurry grey and cold mass that was barely edible. The sludgy rice always got stuck in her gum. And whenever they came in to pump her with more drugs or to evaluate her mental state, they called her 'it'. Not Sakura, not even her, only _it._ Well, they hadn't asked for her name anyway. Sakura wondered if it was a way for them to further dehumanize her, to have distance to her body, and to only see her as an object and not a person.

It seemed to work. Since she started questioning herself and if she was truly a human being. Because what human deserved the treatment she received?

She had started to smell, too. The old vomit and feces in the corner didn't help. The pus from her old unattended wounds smelled slightly too. The stench had become a part of her, as the small voices in the back of her head. At her best she ignored them, at her worst she talked back. She wondered if the voice was another effect of the illusion or the if it was because of their own concoctions they had fed her with.

Then on the fourth day, they dragged her into a large hall. A metal tank was in the middle of the room, and she could see a watery liquid inside through a circled window. Strange markings covered the metal, blended with old fraying scriptures fastened to the surface. People with blank faces surrounded her, some with masks, others who looked like shinobi. It seemed they were there to watch.

"Bath time." A doctor said and ordered her to take off her clothes. She did, as she glanced to the butcher's by the doctor's side. Naked and helpless and shivering, they made her walk up the staircase leading to a plank which was connected to a hole in the water tank. To Sakura's surprise they unlocked her chakra choker.

"Don't be stupid." Was her only warning from the doctor called Daisuke. She sighed. What could she do anyway? With the little chakra she had - which even was suppressed?

"Down." The female doctor ordered her, clucking impatiently.

Sakura gulped and looked down into the hole in the water tank. It was the size of a coffin, and there were no fluorescent lights in it. Just darkness. Only by looking at it she felt claustrophobic.

"Why?" She asked stubbornly. It wasn't a normal bath, she was sure of it. A slap across her cheek made her eyes teary and Daisuke pushed her towards the edge.

Sakura shivered uncontrollably at the edge of the plank. _I'll drown!_ Then a hard hand pushed her over the ledge and she fell tumbling down into the cold water of the tank. Everything went black as they locked the tank.

Then she couldn't remember anything more as panic and water filled her lungs.

Waking up, she gasped and spat and gurgled. But it was only saliva that escaped her mouth, and she looked wildly around, seeing only the same walls of her cell. Her chakra choker was back around her throat and her clothes had been put on. She was dry.

Sakura tried to remember what had happened, but she couldn't.

 _Bad dream of drowning._

On the sixth day, after having eaten the grey mass of rice porridge, Sakura moved uncomfortably. Something felt sticky between her legs. She moved again and started walking in circles around the cell, cracking her joints. And then she felt it. Something ran slowly down her leg and she touched her inner thigh, her fingers met by sticky liquid. Her fingers were red.

 _Gods, not now._

 **The moon blood had to come some time, I guess.**

Sakura stared at her bloody fingers. Then she looked down at her grey dress and it was stained with blood. It seeped and grew and coloured the whole lower part in vermillion. Her green eyes widened as her legs suddenly were stained with currents of blood running down from her thighs to the cell floor.

She screamed as blood flowed from her body, slushing to the ground and splashed at her bare feet, coloring her foot nails red. The pinkette stepped back and slumped down on the ground. The blood kept pouring out from her insides and started gathering around her legs and bottom.

 **It's not real.**

Before the doctors came in, the room had filled to the roof, and she had drowned in her own blood.

Waking up felt like emerging from water, only denser, and with limbs encased in stone. She woke by a voice, scratchy as it was, and still she was glad she had not truly drowned in her own menstrual blood and died. Sakura blinked and coughed, and only yellow slime welled in her throat, not blood. It had been another illusion, but it had seemed so _real._ She had felt the blood flow, she had felt it reach her knees, her throat and the consistence had tasted so _real_.

The doctors had thrown a ragged towel at her and stood inside the glass cubicle at the entrance to her cell, watching her. Their voices drifted to her sensitive ears.

"It seems to have gotten its period. This might be problematic in further experimentation, and I see no purpose of it bleeding from its ovaries. I say we perform a quick hysterectomy. Ana?" The doctor with rash blood red hair murmured and tapped the window thoughtfully. He glanced at Sakura when he noticed her movements and he pointed at the towel. His stern line of a mouth snorted as she wobbled to pick it up. The female doctor called Ana next to him sighed and her manicured yellow nails rasped against her clipboard. Flecks of her short hair shimmered in a indigo nuance in the stark fluorescent lights above.

Sakura obeyed and cleaned up between her legs, without much shame. It wasn't that much blood she realised and quickly finished, and disposed the towel into a trash bin. The other doctor sniffed and nodded. Sakura hadn't focused on their words, but _problematic_ and _hysterectomy_ echoed in her mind. That did not bode well.

"Yes. It probably won't be alive long enough to bear children for further experimentation anyway." The female doctor Ana hummed.

Sakura felt ice gather in her stomach and shoot spikes into her heart. They were going to sterilize her. Unconsciously she let her hand press at her belly. No children? Sakura felt panic rising inside and her eyes glazed over. Now Sasuke would never look at her again. She would be useless! She wouldn't be able to help him revive his clan. She would never stare at her own baby's eyes and see a smile resemble her own.

Shivering, she tried to reach out for the doctors.

"Please, don't…" She croaked, her voice unused and scratchy. Pleading, begging. They just couldn't do it. Her hand touched the glass, smudging it with dried blood, and the doctors looked at her without as much of a hint of emotion in their eyes.

"Shut up." The male red haired doctor snapped and tapped the glass window. "Don't dirty the window, subject."

Sakura stumbled back and fell on her back. Shivering, she cradled into herself. Rocking back and forth, she started hearing the voices again.

" _They'll take your only purpose away!"_ A voice cackled from somewhere inside the room, laughing until it wheezed. " _Isn't that funny?"_

"Stop." Sakura mumbled and her eyes swam with tears. The voices again. "No more."

" _Don't worry dear Sakura-chan, they'll put you out of your misery soon enough!"_ The female voice roared with laughter.

" _Will you even be a woman after they take your reproductive organs away?"_ Another voice chimed in and it sounded disturbingly similar to her father's. " _You're a disgrace."_

" _It's for the better anyway. You'd just have ugly no good babies. They'd be boneless and little cowards, just like you. It's better that they'll never exist."_ A shrill voice concluded.

"Her stress levels are the trigger to her hallucinations, it seems." The masked red haired man mumbled and wrote something down on his clipboard outside her cell. Sakura barely heard him, as the voices grew in number. She clenched her head and murmured intelligible words.

"As the stress levels rise, its paranoia and fear syntaxes are put to pressure, and sends signals with the help of the opiate to its visual and auditory cortex. Quite similar to schizophrenia and psychosis." The doctor drawled and glanced at his colleague. "What would you suggest to be the next stage of experimentation? We need to know what it really _does._ "

"Since the subject is only in the middle between the prodromal and active stage, I wonder where the limit lies. Hmm. We should proceed with a surgery to examine the fluids in its brain and add dopamine to the neurons to strengthen the effect after the hysterectomy. If all goes accordingly, it should fall into the residual phase, or maybe create a new phase altogether, Daisuke." The female doctor said.

" _More drugs!"_

" _Finally they'll pump you up like like the little addict you are. You like this, don't you? Don't you?"_

"Yes, I will prepare for the surgery room. I suggest we add norepinephrine and serotonin to its neurons as well, to maximize the effect." The red haired doctor called Daisuke said and Sakura could barely keep the voices out of her head.

" _They will cut you up like a chicken! And you'll lay paralysed as they pick your bones, cut you up sweet and nicely! Like a chicken! Bwaak bwaak bwaak!"_

" _What will be left of you?"_

" _Bwak bwak buh-waak!"_

"We have to discuss that addition. It would be such a waste if it died. Oh… Should we contact _him_ for the procedure?" Ana said and scratched her head. "Not that I really want to, but…"

"The Warden? He- might be interested. If we can reproduce the opiate it would work perfectly as a biochemical weapon, especially if we succeed to transform it into a gas form. We could sell it, or use it as we see beneficial for Sound. But before that we need to perfect it, since there are still unknown effects. _It_ can still function, somehow." The male voice drifted as a cacophony of voices drowned everything around her, and Sakura bellowed as her head felt like exploding.

" _You're alone, Sakura-chan."_

" _Talk to us!"_

" _Sweet Sakura."_

" _Bwaak, bwaak, like a chicken!"_

"Splendid."

"I will call for a messenger. Hose _it_ down before the surgery. It stinks already."

At the edge of her hearing, water was dripping and turned into a trickle. And all was a static noise as Sakura passed out.

* * *

They had a mirror above the surgery table. Sakura blinked and saw her own reflection. She was naked and restrained with cuffs at her ankles and wrists. Her ribs poked out from her chest and her hips were markedly visible. Her dune like feathery scalp showed her skull's definitions. Drainage channels covered the metal table underneath her and Sakura felt dread fill her body.

The doctors stood beside her and prepared an IV drop and a woman who seemed to be a nurse set out the tools.

The female doctor Ana fixed the IV drop, and pulled a liquid vial into it. Sakura had seen the switch. But she couldn't say anything as her mouth had been gagged and her eyes widened in realisation.

"Ready." Daisuke said and pulled out a scalpel.

They cut into her and she squirmed violently, the pain flaring her sensitive skin. Blinding agony racked through her vision and she gagged, bile splurging into the fabric.

"What- she should have been put under!" A nurse screamed and tried to hold Sakura down.

"What happened to the anesthesia **,** Ana?" The red haired male doctor shrieked as they tried to fasten restraints on her body.

"I don't know!" Ana screamed. A moment of glee in her face flashed, then it was gone and overturned into a worried expression.

"You don't make mistakes like this." Daisuke commented dryly as he fixed the IV drop. Sakura panted through her nose and she could see the blood trail down her pale body in the mirror above her. Numbness spread through her and the relief was more than welcomed.

"The Nikuya changed the IV." Ana said and frowned. "They must have taken the wrong vial."

She heard tidbits of voices when she was half awake as they cut into her brain. She was numb. And tired. All she could see was the mirror above her head, green glowing hands poking into her brain. Other doctors cut into her lower parts, removing her reproductive organs. She saw Ana looking at the organs, and waved at a nurse to put it in a glass container. Then she didn't want to see anymore, so she closed her eyes.

* * *

 _Barren at twelve years old._ Sakura thought drowsily. She woke up in the cell later, exhausted and in a lot of pain. Her fingers felt around her belly, and she could feel the stitches. However, she had no time to rest since the prison door opened.

"Ana." Sakura whispered as the woman in a white coat stood before her.

"Subject." Her voice was sweet, like syrup. And Sakura prepared herself the best she could for what that single word promised.

"Did it make you feel powerful?" She drawled as her hands vibrated in a sudden green light, and her voice was strained. _Medic chakra?_ "Did it make you feel hungry for more?"

"What are you talking about?" Sakura asked weakly. Her stomach throbbed in dull pain, and she felt like a bottomless shell. Was Ana going to heal-

"Did you enjoy it? Killing him?" Ana asked again and she walked up to the girl and her fingers trailed softly down Sakura's cheek. She shivered. Sakura had only killed one man in her life, and of course Ana had known him. _Of course._

"I am the Head of Medicine in this facility. Do you know what that means? I'm the best medic in here. I can stitch people together so we can continue experimentation." Ana smiled. "You've met the Nikuya, right? They're barbarians with no clue as to how be dignified in torture. They have no class, no specific methods. The Nikuya have only one thing in mind- _to break_. Fast and quick. But I'm not like them, you see."

Sakura said nothing. Ana went to draw her fingers down the pinkette's prisoner shirt, rasping her long manicured fingernails against the fabric. Sakura defiantly took a step back.

"I like to break slowly. I like to draw it out. And I can make you pass out in pain as the body can't handle it, and I can wake you up just like that." She snapped her fingers for emphasis. "I'm lucky this night. We won't need to evaluate you until tomorrow afternoon. We have _all night_ to enjoy ourselves."

"I'm sorry." Sakura whispered, because she knew she had killed a man the woman had loved. Ana's eyes lit on fire and her face distorted into a grimace.

Sakura shrieked as Ana took hold of her chakra choker's chains and ripped it forwards so the girl fell on her knees. With a kick of Ana's foot Sakura fell backwards and landed on the cold floor with a grunt. Chains swept around her body as fast she could barely see, _a technique?,_ and bound her to the floor. Ana ripped her grey prisoner shirt off, so Sakura lay half naked on the floor, and she kneeled besides Sakura's pale body.

"Please." Sakura whispered as Ana's eyes filled with mischief.

"I am methodical, unlike the butchers. I have a schedule put out for you. Isn't that great?" She hummed as her fingers trailed down Sakura's collarbone and down to her navel. "Isn't this a perfect canvas. Smooth and pale, without scars. I'll fix that for you."

Sakura shivered and didn't know what to do.

"Did you know that I like to paint?" Ana asked as she drew a nail filled with chakra across Sakura's stomach in swirls, drawing bubbling clear blood. Sakura panted in pain and her eyes swam. "I will engrave the most beautiful painting on your skin, subject. You don't deserve it. But it will be a gift to Yuji. When you die and walk amongst the shore of the River, he will see your body and it's message. He will see my love." Ana said and fanatically drew another bloody nail on Sakura's ribs. "Let's see. A ferocious tiger, what about that?"

So much hatred filled her voice. It was the first time in Sakura's life that she had met a person that hated her _so much_. Like it was breaking Ana apart just touching her, even though it was a touch that filled Sakura with pain.

Sakura was tired. Tired of the constant pain Ana made her feel. Her body was battered, scarred and trampled. Why did she need it again? To live? It was a hollow fleshy shell of the person she had once been. Cracks ran through her skin in a spider web that trailed with blood.

"It's pretty beautiful." Ana huffed satisfactory. Sakura felt immense relief momentarily as she thought _she's done, she's done, she'll leave me alone._

"There are 206 bones in a human body." Ana hummed and went to grab Sakura's hand. "But we'll narrow it down a bit. There are 3 bones in the upper arm; the clavicle, the scapula and the humerus. Four bones in the lower arm; the ulna, the radius, the carpals and the hand - which has the whole of 27 little pretty bones! Do you know how it feels like to break them?"

Sakura gasped and Ana's hand glowed in a green light, pulsing and fluttering.

"No…" She wailed.

"The ulna, lower arm." Ana sang and her chakra teared into Sakura's arm, through the muscle and fat and tendons, and _crack_ it broke cleanly. Ana continued and Sakura felt adrenaline pump in her body, wondering when the pain would start, because she couldn't feel anything. Then she saw the swelling, and when Ana came to the radius, Sakura felt the pain. The ulna, then the carpals, then the radius. Like the ticking of a clock, at each tick, the pain grew and seared through her muscles. It hurt even more as she squirmed.

Sakura screamed and her throat was raw and dry and she asked for forgiveness, over and over, and said she was sorry and it hurts and it hurts. Ana was deaf to her callings.

Ana told her what bone she broke each time and Sakura found herself in a burning fire, blistering pain scorching her arm.

Cackling, Ana rose her glowing hands to wipe sweat from her forehead.

"Look at you!" She laughed. "Like a sack of potatoes!"

Sakura couldn't say anything, she only coughed wetly and her body ached in a numb cold fire. Then Ana went to her hand. It was limp in Ana's cold hands and she inspected it, interest in her hot eyes.

"See these thin bones on the back of your hand?" Ana quirked. "Let's see if I can pick them up."

And then her long chakra filed nail dug into Sakura's back hand, blood gurgling, Sakura wheezing, and then she hooked the bone inside her hand and dragged it up. It sprouted in an unnatural position and Ana continued to dig them up, one by one, until Sakura's hand was ravaged with blood and muscle and sprouting bones. It almost looked like claws as Sakura's eyes swam with tears.

"Hungry?" Ana asked and pulled something out of her pocket. Sakura could barely see it in the blinking light of the light bulb above her, but she could see that it was a glass container. Of course she was hungry, she hadn't had the spiny rice porridge for two days. She was starving.

Ana took whatever it was out of the glass container and put something at Sakura's mouth. It was tacky and wet, but she opened her mouth and chewed. Metallic liquid spread in her mouth and she gagged.

"You didn't really need it anyway." Ana mumbled. Sakura felt more tears gather in her eyes and she tried to spit it out, but Ana's hand violently slammed against her mouth, and she saw stars as she had to swallow her own reproductive organ.

Ana laughed heartily. The woman then looked at her wristwatch and huffed.

"Time's up. I have to clean you up, subject. The others won't notice a thing that happened to you- I'm that good!" She sing songed and the green chakra in her hands sparked. "I don't want you to feel relief just yet, though. Did you know that there's circulatory methods when healing to make it smoother, less painful? I don't like those methods so we'll go without them."

Sakura felt a constant throb in her arm; like she had bruised herself badly. No matter what Ana said about her healing methods, Sakura almost breathed in relief at the thought.

As Ana healed her arm, Sakura realised that it was almost worse than when she had broken it. Sakura couldn't scream anymore so all she did was gasp and breathe and cry as her bones retracted and healed in excruciating pain.

"Until next time, subject. Then it'll be the ribs. And maybe a cocktail of your marrow fluid?" Ana saluted her and went out the door, leaving Sakura empty and hurting.

 _How is this worth it?_

* * *

 **A/N**

Thought I'd just put this up as well since I was done with it anyway. Always appreciate reviews!


	5. The Irritating Head

**Chapter 5 - The Irritating Head**

Sakura was constantly feverish, constantly afraid of what might emerge from the darkness of her cell and she was constantly hating herself for being so easily captured.

 _If I only had had the courage to escape Hanamachi. Then nothing like this would have happened._

When Ana healed her sufficiently enough after her sessions of torture, Sakura could pace inside the cell. Moving made it almost feel like she wouldn't wither away in that dark hole. She ate her meals, never getting used to the taste. She defecated in  
the bucket they had given her. She counted heartbeats. She slept on the thin futon in her cell, which she could almost have gone without since she felt every stone and small dent in the stony floor.

Sakura saw things, things that made no sense, and things that made too much sense. She saw morbidly huge bodies with swelling muscles and limbs in places they shouldn't be, she saw the ground move and swallow her, she saw her bones break and multiply,  
she saw her mother's eyes in her rice porridge.

And she believed it every time, because it wasn't a genjutsu. She didn't even know if it was an illusion sometimes.

The girl almost lost count of how long she had been in the cell one day, so she decided to scratch marks of each day on the wall with a small sharp pebble she had found. The light bulb in the cell was the only light source, and sometimes it flickered  
and died. So she learnt how to go along in the cell without stepping on her old vomit and feces, and she could feel on the wall where the small dents representing a day gone by was.

Sakura was tired, but she functioned like a large mechanism, not broken yet. Even though the things whispering in the dark truly made it hard for her to continue functioning.

The chakra choker didn't allow her to use chakra that went out of her skin, but she had found a few loopholes in the suppressant. She could use chakra inside her body. The prisoner closed her eyes and called upon the source of power. Her chakra lingered  
in her solar plexus, then it travelled through her veins and out to her fingertips. The nature of the teachings at the Academy was basically learning how to control the main flow of chakra in the upper body. But Sakura wanted to explore more.

Sakura felt the standard chakra pathways being filled with power and she vibrated with the feeling, like a drug addict getting their fix. There was a light tug in her left arm, and Sakura confusedly tried to locate it. She discovered another pathway,  
which she gingerly tried to force little chakra through. Sakura felt the tinge of a new pathway being discovered as her chakra flowed through it for the first time. It was unused and presented the potential to transfer chakra to her back and right  
shoulder. Sakura tingled with her own chakra and felt alive, for the first time in a long while.

And that was when Ana came inside the cell, her lips painted red, and with a whole new toolbox brought with her. That night, Sakura was taught the different muscles in her thigh and shins, and how devastating a drill could be. At the same time, Ana injected  
another vial into her body, and Sakura saw colors crack in her vision. She saw the world in screams, and Ana turned into an entity with the world in her hand.

Sakura was left healed, but broken. Her inner voice was there, a presence in the back of her mind, and she decided to break the silence between them. She almost never talked with her inner mind, but now her loneliness scraped her being, and she was hurting  
and she wanted to share the pain.

 _I'm going mad Inner. I can't take this anymore._

 **I know. I don't know what's real either**.

 _Should we… Just end it?_

 **I've thought about that too**.

Silence.

 **But I don't want to. I really fucking want to live.**

 _But how can we live like this? The only way we know something is real is if we wake up another day, and even then we don't really know if we are alive. What kind of life is that?_

 **There must be an antidote. They wouldn't create something like this without a plan B.**

 _I can't- no more, Inner. I hate this. I don't want this anymore. I want mama and papa. I want- I want it to be a bad dream. I don't want this to be reality._

 **You think it's easy to break a person's will?**

 _I know it's easy._

 **It's not, though. We would be a shell now if not for our will.**

 _Then what is it? What drives us?_

 **Purpose**. Inner smiled. **We want to find out what our purpose is. And we both know that it's not to die.**

 _Our will is weak. Only the want to know why we are here is weak. We can't- go on just that like. It's not enough_.

 **What else do we have?**

 _I want to taste a fresh apple again_.

 **Is that all?** Inner scoffed.

 _Yes. That and watch my illusions kneel to me. Watch the doctors and Nikuya breath blood and burn slowly. See Ana break in a crumple of bones. Watch the four men that took me vanish in a bottomless pit._

 **Apples sounds nice.**

That was the first time Sakura felt killer intent. She could feel it roll off in waves from her, like a volcano about to erupt. And she wanted them to feel pain. It wasn't structured, it wasn't rational, it wasn't like her. But she desired it so bad. 

* * *

As she woke up twenty two days after she had been captured, a large hole she had not seen before had been dug in front of her bed. The rocks had cracked, like an earthquake had destroyed that singular part of her cell, and the lusty scent of earth and  
gravel reached her nose. Had the doctors decided to let her have an unorthodox toilet? She already had a bowel though. Why had they dug a hole in her cell?

Sakura felt her fear well up inside, and yet she crawled to the edge and peered down. What she saw didn't make sense, because it was her. Her own naked corpse lay sprawled in the deep grave, her pink hair swirling around the rotting head. The eyes were  
no longer green, instead they were decomposed and pale white, pupiless. Her skull peeked out from falling flesh, and yellow pus dribbled down to the earth. Her body was mangled and all the bones were broken, sticking up from flesh at unnatural places.  
The putrid stench reached her nose. Something flickered in her peripheral vision, a shadow, but she was too focused on her dead body to care for another illusion.

Sakura let out a guttural sound and hobbled away from the grave's edge, shivering uncontrollably. Was that her fate here? Was she going to rot in this cell? Huddling closer to herself, she let tears fall to the dirty cell floor. These illusions would  
be her demise. The grave was still there, and Sakura didn't know what else to do than shiver and pray it would disappear soon. The shadow vanished behind her as she cried.

 _How do I get it to stop_?

 **There must exist an antidote**.

 _We don't even know where it came from._

 **Remember when they thought we were from Suna? They didn't create it here, so it must come from there.**

 _True. But- Inner let's face it. We will probably never leave this place. Not alive, at least._

 __

* * *

She whimpered as her world cracked and the colors disappeared. Ana made her kneel, made her rub her face in her own feces, made her bleed dry, and she dreamt of breaking her into tiny pieces and feed them to dogs.

Her morbid thoughts grew each day, as the humiliation of her body continued.

What would revenge taste like? Even if she was no longer a human, an animal could rip their throats out. If she somehow was relieved of her shackles, she would roar and rip and shred. Like the animal she had become. She was obeying them for now, because  
no matter what she wanted to live. 

* * *

One day, which she guessed was the fortieth day of capture, she was mopping the hallway due to her obedience deemed approving enough, and heard a scream of obscenities which reached her ears. Her dull eyes looked up and saw two Nikuya carry an iron clad  
box. The strange thing about the swearing was that neither of the butchers uttered a sound, because they never could. Their mouths had been sewn shut and their only way of communication were grunts and hand signs, to keep secrets probably.

No, the cursing came from inside the iron box. Sakura's blank expression remained. She could never trust her mind nowadays, so she simply turned her head and continued mopping the floor.

Suddenly one of the Nikuya slipped on the wet floor she just had mopped and with a crunching sound fell straight on his back. The iron box slipped through his fingers and clattered on the floor. The old box creaked and the lid cracked open. Something  
silvery and red-brown rolled out.

It was a severed head. With silvery hair and blood between its teeth, it cackled as it saw the fallen butcher. The other Nikuya helped the fallen one up, and Sakura stared at the head at her feet.

"The _fuck_ you looking at, fucking heathen." The pretty and bloodied head looked at her with scorn and spat a glob of blood which splattered at her foot. Mechanically, Sakura bowed down and picked up the head by its hair, very soft hair  
she noted. Its eyes widened and his mouth opened, but Sakura's fist was quicker.

A squishy sound and the impact of flesh against bone snapped her out of it. The head was real. _Not a hallucination._ Sakura dropped the wailing head and it hit the ground right on the severed part at the throat. The thing, the real _severed_ cursing  
head, glowered at her and cursed some more. Something about suffering and a person named Jashin-sama. Sakura blankly stared at it in shock.

The butchers had taken the iron box off the ground and snatched the head from Sakura's feet. A frosty white gaze found her and she fumbled with her mop and started to quickly mop the floor again. She started with the thick steaming blood which had flown  
from the head's throat into small blobs on the floor, and a bigger splash where she had dropped it. The two Nikuya started walking again, shaking the box to quiet down the cursing head.

Sakura stared at the box again, forgetting her task at hand. It was a really displeased head, what with the cursing not getting any lower. It disappeared into the lower level staircase with the butchers hurrying away.

Sakura wondered where his body was. But then again, wondering was energy draining. She focused on her mundane task instead and mopped up the blood coloring the hallway.

Then the next thing she knew, she was back in the water tank. And something inside her flickered, like a candle light. Clawing in the liquid Sakura screamed but only bubbles escaped her mouth. Disoriented and panicked, she tried to see, but all was black.

 _What is up and what is down?_

She struggled, but after a while she stopped. Fighting it did nothing, so she gave up. The flickering candle was all she could hold on to. So she cradled it in her mind, never wanting the small flame to blow out.

Bits of someone asking her things flooded her mind.

"What is chakra?" Someone asked her repeatedly. But she never knew the answer.

She woke up, dry and breathing. Her chakra choker was back at her throat. And she couldn't remember anything, again. Growling, Sakura went around in circles in her cell. Her limbs felt weak and her legs almost gave in after her thirtieth walk-around.

She didn't know what was real, what was a dream, and what was an illusion. Sakura sat down and laughed, hysterically and shrill. She was so tired of it all.

On what she guessed to be the fifty fourth day of capture as she looked at her markings in the wall, Sakura recalled that it would be spring by now. If she had calculated it correctly, the date was the 28th of March.

 **Happy birthday, or something.**

 _Yeah. Congratulations to me. Think they'll make me a birthday cake?_

 **If you ask for it kindly**.

And next thing she knew, Ana was telling Sakura to laugh as she watched her innards spill out, and when Sakura didn't, Ana smeared her scalpel on Sakura's cheek.

"I'll help you smile." Ana said and opened Sakura's mouth with the edge of the scalpel, rested it for a moment on her tongue- then sliced it right and left. Sakura screamed as her cheeks opened up.

"A little sweet and crooked smile." Ana murmured as the blood splattered on her clothes.

Best birthday ever. Sakura coughed as Ana healed her stomach, putting back the innards.


	6. A Religious Fanatic

**Chapter 6 - A religious fanatic is actuallygreatcompany**

TW INSECTS AND OTHER GROSS STUFF PER USUAL 

* * *

Sakura lay feverish on the futon, her last fill of drugs had made her more delirious than before and she saw stars crack in her vision. She was desperately trying to put herself together, one piece at a time. So she was not very surprised when the door  
slammed open, because what she needed right now was more pain, and a small round thing was kicked inside.

Sakura breathed calmly through her nose, and then looked at the round thing that sounded like a wounded animal.

It was the silvery severed head from the hallway. Sakura blinked. Why did they throw him in her cell? She breathed, thinking. Illusion? She was curious.

"Why are you here?" She rasped - her voice was scratchy and used to only screaming and answering evaluation questions from Ana and Daisuke - and looked at the head, but then she saw the gag. Moving to the glaring butchered head, she took the  
knotted gag off. The head spat saliva and blood at her feet. Sakura made a noise.

 _If this is another illusion, it is a creative one._

"Fuck if I know. Something about you being an obedient little shit and a shortage of cells." The head snarled.

Then he started praying for some religion she didn't know, not giving her any more thought. Sakura felt just as alone as before, but now all she heard was foreign words. It was like an addition to her illusions, just that it actually was real. The head  
and his muttering was hard to listen to. She didn't understand it. The words trickled down his mouth, smearing the air with grease. It was heavy.

 **Is that even a language?**

Sakura wondered that too.

"It's fucking cold." The head clattered his teeth, longingly looking at Sakura's futon. It seemed he had finished praying. She had barely noticed.

"I thought you couldn't feel anything." Sakura blinked. "I mean, you're a head."

"Fuck, I can. It hurts and it hurts and it hurts. But it's also cold." The silvery head shivered violently. Suddenly, the head fell over to his side from his standing up position on his severed throat, and fell on his cheek. An annoyed sound  
escaped his lips.

"So you want the futon?" Sakura asked tentatively.

His lips cracked into a broad, deranged smile. A split that had stopped bleeding began again, painting his lower lip red. "Fuck, yes."

"You can't." Sakura said and tilted her head. "I'm not touching you again. So you aren't getting to the futon."

"Fuck, little shit!" The head snarled at her. Then he started to gape and close his mouth, and somehow he started to move from his spot.

"Are you trying to roll up to me?" Sakura deadpanned.

"I'm going to snap your pretty little neck!" The head cackled and rolled a little further. Sakura could only look in amusement as the little head rolled twitching around. As it got a little closer, Sakura nudged it with her bare foot and it  
rolled further away from her, cursing and spluttering things about blood and Jashin-sama.

Sakura didn't care about the mumbling head, so she rolled over to the side to try and get some sleep.

Something in the darkness moved, and she saw black slender legs scatter along the ceiling. Sakura yelped as she saw at a giant spider in the corner of her cell, in the ceiling. It spun a web and its several shiny eyes glistened red. The eight legged creature  
suddenly sprung out of the corner and landed on her stomach and she tried to fight it, but it started hacking into her body, like Ana had done with knives, and blood was everywhere and she screamed. She passed out as the giant spider opened its jaws  
and closed around her throat.

"You sick or something?" She woke up to a severed head staring at her, at the edge of the futon. She ignored the head and rose to walk around the cell, cracking her spine.

"Hey! I'm fucking talking to you, heathen!"

"Shut up!" Sakura growled.

"You don't get to tell me to-"

Then the door slammed open and several Nikuya trickled inside, two of them took the screaming head and put him into a box. The others went to Sakura and held her down. Daisuke and Ana followed them, and evaluated her body, looking into her eyes with a  
flashlight, poking her stomach and asking her over and over again what she had seen last night.

"Spider. It ate me." She coughed as a Nikuya tired of her silence and kicked her stomach.

"Were you afraid?" Daisuke asked.

"Yes." Sakura cried.

"Anything else?" Ana asked.

"No."

"Only one illusion in six hours- that's too little. Should we try the new hallucinogenic strengthening concoction?" Daisuke frowned.

"Yes." Ana smiled and produced a syringe, inserting it into Sakura's throat. Bubbling saliva fled from Sakura's mouth as she felt the serum work quickly into her system.

They left, and more monsters visited. Sakura fought them and died and fought all over again. She yelled and cried. When at last the ground swallowed her, she heard a bang from the metal door. 

* * *

"Oh." Sakura said as the Nikuya threw the head inside her cell again. It rolled on the floor and cursed faster than she could think.

The silver hair was ruffled with bright blood, and Sakura saw the stitches at his forehead.

"They mucked with your brain this time?" The pinkette said and unconsciously massaged her scalp. The stitches had been taken away, but she still remembered being awake during the brain surgery. They had installed a mirror right above the surgery  
table so she could see the whole process of them digging into her pink mushy brain, and see the syringes dig deep into the sinewy mass. She shivered at the memory.

"Just shut up." The silvery head growled. "I gotta pray."

"You're the strangest thing I've ever seen that is real." Sakura pointed out blatantly. The silvery head squeezed its eyes at her and hummed. The blood had barely dried at his scalp.

"But what's real? Truly? Fuck. I'm real because I am pain. Jashin-sama made me real. Suffering- it's the only feeling that you can't imagine."

"Suffering… Does not have to physical." Sakura said and looked a crow the size of a dog, picking inside its own chest. It cawed in pain as it picked its heart out. It had a beautiful silver crown on its head.

"Of course it doesn't!" The head snorted. "Hey, what are you looking at?" It snapped and tried to look at the corner where Sakura's eyes froze.

"My demons." Sakura said, so tired, rose and walked up to the crow. It bled and black feathers whirled to the floor as it fell, its innards spilling out from the cavity its beak had broken and dug up. It ate its own heart. But there was pride  
in the crow's eyes, together with the pain.

 _I'm tired of you._

Sakura clenched her fist, and then she kicked it. A whoosh of air vibrated through the cell and Sakura's foot met nothing but the ground. Pain sliced her foot at the impact, but the crow was gone. A shadow on the ground of a cloaked man made her blink,  
but then it was gone as well.

It's not real.

"Why'd you do that?" The head whined.

"So I know if it's real." Sakura muttered and went back to sit by the head. "I can overcome them sometimes, if I'm not too afraid. My ghosts."

"You're real fucked up, pinky."

"Says the chopped off head." She retorted.

"Wasn't chopped." He cursed. "Kakuzu the fucking heathen, piece of shit- he had a katana on flame and fucking severed my head in a swing. Said he'd keep my fucking body and then he fucking sold me to these guys. Motherfucker!"

"He sold your head?"

"Yeah, the bastard did."

"So you are wanted in the Bingo Books?"

"Whatever." The head growled.

"Do you know who keeps us here?" The pinkette asked almost excitedly.

"Some fucked up scientists with too much money and creativity. They don't appreciate true suffering." The head gruffed.

"Do they have a name?" Sakura pressed. She needed to know who they were so she could figure out why they kept here there.

"I don't know- what does it matter anyway? I'll kill them all when I get my body back." He said as if it was clear as day he would, one day. A promise of slaughter resounded in the cell. Sakura liked that sound.

"I support that." Sakura muttered.

Silence.

"What's your name?" Sakura asked, almost timidly. She reluctantly admitted to herself that she appreciated the company, even if it was a cut off head. It was better than whispers of madness.

"Hidan." He drowsed. "I'm not interested in yours. Girl sounds just fucking fine to me. I'm gonna sleep, I'm fucking tired. Shut up now or I'll rip your spleen out."

"I'd like to see you try," Sakura said and felt her teeth bare, but it was not due to pain.

"On Jashin-sama blessed suffering, I swear I will find a way." Hidan's eyes were slanted and Sakura didn't really doubt him.

"No need to be so aggressive, Hidan-san. Don't lose your head." Sakura said and bared her teeth again. Was she smiling? She hadn't done that in a long while.

"When I get my body back you should be the one listening to that advice." The head snarled, spitting a glob of blood at her.

"Ah, is that so." Sakura cooed. Hidan wailed and cursed her existence.

"You are now officially on my shit-list." Hidan snapped and his eyes glowed. Sakura only blinked and smiled. Huffing, she went to her small futon and snatched the dirty blanket. Walking up to Hidan's head, he seemed to realise what she was doing.

"You just try suffocating me you little bitch-"

And then Sakura's deft fingers gently lifted his head and laid it on the blanket, and carefully wrapped his head with the blanket. Hidan stared wide-eyed at her as he felt quite comfortable for the first time since his head was severed. Then he growled  
and just kind of happened to nuzzle his head deeper into the blanket. It smelled like old sweat.

"Bitch, don't baby my head. I will not seek comfort in life, for that is an insult to Jashin-sama! Get me out of this fucking piece of piss cloth-"

"Who is Jashin-sama?" Sakura cut him off. Hidan only processed for a second, then he grinned happily.

"Oh, Jashin-sama is everything."

And the head talked her to sleep about the god of suffering. It was as if a soft breeze let the words caress her, however ugly they were. It was a strange mixture of pain and pleasure in hearing the words of a god who stood for all immoral things she  
could think of. Or was it that strange? A shinobi killed, or got killed. Why not use the profession and combine it with a religious belief system to glorify it?

Sakura woke up by the tingling sensation of something touching her leg. Blinking, she tried to make out what it was in the darkness. Had Head Hidan somehow rolled over to her to tickle her spleen out?

With a start, she saw a black snake crawl beside her leg. Sakura bit her lower lip hard, she couldn't move, couldn't breathe.

The snake saw her wake, and it bobbed its head. Yellow slits stared at her.

" _Little thing._ " It hissed. " _Little, fucked up thing_."

Sakura swallowed harshly.

"Don't." She whispered, the words fragile like glass. "Go away."

" _Insanity, how does it taste? Does it taste sweet, like your mother's milk? Does it taste like the chapped skin on your lips, sinewy and metallic? Insanity. Does it embrace you? Does it grip your throat, sing you to sleep? Does insanity lull you into a time where you are but a fleck in pretty blue eyes? How does it feel like? Does it feel like loneliness and abandonment, encasing you into nothing? How does it destroy you?_ "  
The snake hissed and slithered up beside her leg, and up onto her stomach. Sakura couldn't breathe. Couldn't blink.

" _A kiss of insanity. How much more do you crave it?_ " The black snake hissed and it sounded like a voice she had heard a million times, in a hundred worlds. Every voice she ever loved hearing, every voice she had smiled in listening to.  
And it broke her.

" _I make you feel special, don't I? Only you can see me, you are the only one with that privilege. You're more special than Naruto, more special than Sasuke! Finally!_ " It hissed and Sakura felt its tongue flicker on her throat. Her head  
was spinning.

 _"A kiss! It is all you want! Someone who loves you. And I love you, Sakura._ " The black snake curled on her chest, snuggling its leathery skin on her collarbone.

" _We can dance as corpse_ s." It hissed sweetly and opened its jaws, teeth shining, tongue slippery, and it snapped its jaws on her mouth, biting into her, and she howled. Struggling to get it away, she tried to grip the snake's body, but  
it was gone as she opened her eyes. There was no blood on her mouth anymore. The same shadow on the ground she had seen once before flickered, and the shadow bubbled like dark blood boiling, and then it was gone too.

It's not real.

Crying, she found the bundle of a blanket encasing Head Hidan and lifted it to her chest.

"What-" Hidan mumbled drowsily.

"Bad nightmare." Sakura hiccuped and hugged the head, sniffing his hair. It smelled like sweat and old blood and moss. "Real bad."

"So hugging the severed head after your bad nap nap makes it all better? Fucking hell, the logic in that." Hidan groused in her chest. "Oh, you're crying. Gross. My throat is fucking leaking, you know. You'll get blood and other stuff on  
your-"

"I don't care." Sakura hiccuped again. "Just let me hug you."

Hidan grumbled. "Get your shit together, girl." The head ordered in all severeness. The pinkette nodded through tears and snot bubbling together, and patted Hidan's head, earning a warning growl.

"I will." She sniffled. "I will."

They took him away again the next day, and somehow, Sakura felt impatience. Hidan's torture took too long. Walking in circles didn't help. Counting her heartbeats didn't help. Scratching her arms didn't help. Watching worms eat her skin didn't do anything.  
She just let them.

And then the door creaked and he was thrown inside her cell.

"Hidan?" Sakura gasped as she saw all the blood spilling through his nose and mouth and a hole in his cheek. He didn't answer. Shuffling up to him, she took up his head. A ghastly gash at his cheek showed sinewy muscles and his teeth, a hole  
large as her palm which seemed to have been gnashed into him. Sakura frowned and sat down on her futon, trying to focus on the loophole her chakra had found in the chakra choker at her throat.

He couldn't be dead. He couldn't be. He couldn't leave her like that. Selfish bastard.

His eyes stared unseeing at the stone wall. Suddenly, his head moved and Sakura found a short bliss fill her chest, but as she tried to make contact his throat wriggled. Suddenly, a rodent fell out Hidan's open bleeding throat. It splashed down in blood  
and brain mass onto the floor, breathing rapidly, probably dying. It squeaked.

Sakura realised what they had done as her blood froze, and her hand shot out to the rat's small bloodied body. She felt it move between her fingers, the matted fur was soft, and without thinking she crushed it. An explosion of grit, small bones and innards  
spilled out her fingers and then she threw it away to the corner of her cell.

Growling, she wiped her gory hand on her grey shirt. Hidan's head was cold in her lap and she refocused on the loopholes in her choker. Her chakra came in a green thin, thin streamline through the four loopholes she had found, and they streamed to the  
gash at Hidan's cheek. All she could do was heal the wound shallowly, the brain was far too complicated and she'd risk damaging it further. Like thin fragile threads, the chakra knitted the thrashed cheek muscles the best way they could. It took twenty  
minutes for her to thread the skin to a slight satisfactory level. Blood had gathered in her lap, like a small red pool. She didn't care. Hidan still didn't move.

Panic seized her heart, and she didn't want to be alone anymore.

Sakura suddenly started praying, not really knowing if it would help him heal or not. The words were unfamiliar on her tongue, and like grease smoothing down her teeth. Reciting Hidan's unorthodox religion felt alien and strange, and when she came to  
the second verse she could almost feel the shadows moving in her peripheral vision, but she didn't care.

"At night, the shrunken head will speak,  
"tsantsa I am, and so now thou is weak."  
A practice of toxic rosy sonnets,  
burnt with ribbon of a dead baby's blue bonnet for Jashin's glory."

Hidan's head was still so eerily quiet in her arms. So she continued to sing for him.

"Fires ablaze with the spark of dead hope,  
mounting the weapon, the yarn-braided rope. Choking, strangling the straining throats, melting the earwax of a three-legged goat."

Sakura's breath was wet with saliva and her words burned her tongue, but she kept praying. Her eyes were crusty.

"From the hairy chin of a bark-brown mole,  
with a darkened and blind earth-bound soul. To the bark-brown mole of a hairy chin, mantled by pale and crusty, peeling skin."

She didn't worship this Jashin-sama god, but she felt closer to him than before as she recited the prayer Hidan had whispered to her as she slept. She kind of understood. She didn't sympathise with the religion, but she could understand it. Equal suffering.  
Gods how she wished that when she suffered, for each bone that was broken, Ana would feel it too. It was a crazy religion, but she was probably crazy now, too.

"Saunter on down to Lake Aoyagari,  
we'll voice our ceremony there in torrential rain. From the root of a lamb's tooth, yank it out fast, smear the metallic blood and say these words at last:

"Write with the crow's anthracite feather,  
sing with the dove's beautiful wing!  
In this grey, dull, showery weather,  
or early in the new green Spring.  
Take my heart, eat it with love  
but please always remember,  
If using blood of thee dove,  
you may die in December."

"The skies churn black to the ticking of our clocks, let us sacrifice these wenches layered in old frocks. We don't have much time, invoke the spirit of Jashin! Inhale the bloody aroma from the tip of the red tulips."

Sakura sang the unsettling prayer and hummed to the tune. For three hundred and seventy four heartbeats, Hidan didn't wake. It was the most logical end of it, though. A rat had been inside his head and any person would have died from it. A cockroach the  
size of a wolf appeared beside her, and for once, she could ignore it as it bared its yellowing teeth at her. Even when it started to rot and blacken, and whine and squirm to death at her side, she didn't bat an eye.

Five hundred and one heartbeats later, Hidan groaned and she was on her last verse. Warmth gathered in her stomach and even though reciting the prayers had given her an headache worse than the one the drugs gave her, she smiled.

"Are you praying?" He groused. It almost sounded happy. Sakura blinked.

"No, I'm not. Definitely not." Sakura hurried to say, feeling embarrassment rise in her cheeks. Hidan's smile faltered, then he pouted. He didn't talk, and that was so not like Hidan.

"Are you moping?" Sakura asked.

"No." He said stubbornly, firing death glares at her. "Ow. My head hurts."

"I'd be pleasantly surprised if it didn't. What happened back there? A rat came out of your throat." Sakura said and nudged the head to lay on her futon.

"The butchers had a toothy rodent inside a glass, put it on my cheek and set a fire jutsu to the glass bottom. Old boring torture method. Fucking rats, man. Went crazy trying to survive the heat so it dug and ate into my cheek and through my brain."  
Hidan said and bit his lip.

"Ow." Sakura said. She couldn't comment on it anyway else.

"The rat fucking burrowed right through. I admit it gave me an headache." Hidan cackled and let his tongue wet his chapped lips.

"Seriously, why is your religion not more popular?" Sakura muttered. "You should have died ten times over."

"Heathens." Hidan spat. "They don't understand. Cowards, all of them. Unworthy cockroaches."

"It's about suffering, right? People don't like that." Sakura thought loudly. "It's what people like to avoid, not praise."

"Sufferings is pure, it's beautiful, and it connects people. It's progress of life in its purest form." His voice was covered in truth, coated by fanaticism and a hint of madness. And she liked the idea. Maybe her suffering was worth it? Did  
it make her a part of something?

The cell door opened, and a woman in white appeared. At that, Sakura swallowed her words and thoughts of suffering. It wasn't pure, it was dirty. It wasn't pretty, it was ugly. And the woman standing in front of her proved that.

"Oh? The irritating head is in here as well?" Ana muttered. "Well, it's fine. You can just watch."

And then Ana broke her again, and Hidan was silent for once as he watched Sakura scream. At the end, Ana took the scissor she had used on Sakura's body, and grabbed a hard grip on her foot.

"Your big toe is really ugly, all yellowish and dirty." She said and started cutting it away. Sakura almost passed out, but Ana woke her up with a syringe filled with adrenaline.

When the monster was gone, and just having healed the scissor cuts on her torso, Sakura bled ominously from her ravaged foot. Maybe Ana didn't care for healing it. Reaching for it, she picked up her toe and felt around the edges of the stump. Searching  
for the loopholes in her chakra choker, she found them, and started to gather the small amount of chakra that could slip through. Her hand lit in a small, small waver of green light, and her fingers traced the severed part of her toe. She had come  
to severely hate the green glow, but she closed her eyes and pressed on.

"You have suffered." Hidan said suddenly, uncharacteristically solemnly as Sakura tried to stitch her toe back with the little chakra she had. She didn't answer, she needed to concentrate. She was tired and her throat was dry from screaming.

"I will pray for you." Hidan said, as if it was an honour. "And oh what to yearn does thou have? The bloody intestines of a baby calf? Or possibly the product of some wooden tar, spilling from venomous lips – a polished noir.

"Hear the requiem coming from the cathedral, where blood spilled once on the marble floor octahedral. When pine box becomes bed, and bed becomes pine box,the wood will be whittled from the beaks of ravens and hawks."

Hidan's voice bleached the air with words sung from a cut throat and Sakura felt sleepy and tired and exhausted. So she feverishly slept to the words of Hidan's prayer, her toe reattached to the stump. It was crooked, but at least it stuck. 

* * *

**A/N**

The poem/prayer which Sakura firsts says, then Hidan, is from /poems/about/Gory and is called Voodoo, written by C. Quinn. I did some very minor changes, but all the cred goes to Quinn.


	7. A Boiling Shadow of Blood

**Chapter 7 - A Boiling Shadow of Blood**

In the darkness, something moved. Something clanked. Like the shadow of the moon, a shape appeared. A marble skinned man slowly floated towards her, his feet not moving, not touching the ground, as if he was hung on a meat hook. His eyes were blue, pale  
blue

and he was red around the eyes, as if he had never fallen asleep. Faster and faster he came at her. The dead naked man opened his mouth, in which there were yellow teeth with flecks of blood, and he screeched, the hollow sound of the dead. It echoedaround  
her and wouldn't end, it would never stop.

Sakura froze as she sat down and watched the man scream at her, unintelligible noises of dead things.

"Stop, please." She begged, but the dead man wouldn't listen, and his hands grabbed her thigh and gripped it hard, bruising her tender skin. It was like he wanted her to save him. Sakura squeezed her eyes shut, whimpering.

"I can't help you." She said and opened her eyes. The dead man's face was right in front of her, his blue eyes covered by a white translucent film, and he opened his mouth. Sakura looked away, and she saw something in the corner.

The shadow of boiling dark blood grew on the ground in front of her and she distantly wondered why that shadow appeared every time she had another already bad illusion.

The shadow grew more and the man it was supposed to grow from was not behind her. But the shadow stood right next to her and she sighed angrily.

"What are you supposed to be?" She snarled, disturbing Hidan's sleep as a gruffed. The shadow of blood didn't answer her, only edged closer to her and wrapped its long slender shadow arms around her. A cold breeze fluttered in the nape of herneck

and she shivered in the shadow's embrace.

" **You will see me**." Something said, and she couldn't be sure if it was her own mouth which had said it or something else, and it was so dark and bloody and it came from the ground and Sakura froze. It had so much power and no other illusionbefore  
/it had ever expelled such raw force.

She knew it was different.

Like a storm, it ravaged her body, flinging her side to side in a violent whirl. Like the night, it made her blind, and lust for the soft shadow's touch. Like the harrowing howl of a ravine, it whipped her into a fall, and she felt flowers bloom in blood.

And then it disappeared, like the ghost of a warm touch on her throat. Sakura could feel her face become chalky white. Who had made her feel that way? What had it been? That had made her feel like the crust on a bread crumb, made her feel like the falteringearth  
/beneath her feet?

Sakura slumped down further.

* * *

They came in to hose her down later on, and the water was like a harsh force raining down on her. They didn't deign to give her a towel after, so Sakura huddled in a corner, freezing and hacking teeth. Hidan was thrown in as well, with severe burns markinghis  
/face and scalp. Sakura watched in cold fascination as Hidan's skin healed during the night, accompanied by loud insults and a bit of prayer and senseless talking with her. To her surprise, his beautiful silver hair grew back as well.

* * *

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Sakura knew she had always had a proficiency for chakra control, but never really for chakra sensing. It started as an ebb and flow of dark things, her sensitive net of chakra picked it up without problem. Her chakra sensing was like a spider's net, ifsomeone  
/tread on it, she knew. Which was weird, because she had a chakra choker around her neck. It was supposed to suppress her chakra, not magnify it. But she didn't want to ask the doctors about it, since it could be useful to actually use herchakra  
/at some time in the future when they least expected it.

So she continued to spin her web, and then one day there was something on the outer corners of her net.

Then the imposing chakra, treading on her thin threads, it grew. The person, or presumably monster, wasn't even in her cell. She felt it wander outside. She could even pinpoint its location, that strong it was. What kind of thing was that? It sent herto  
/the wall at the far end, as far away she could to escape the chakra presence which pressed at all of her senses. It spoke of carnage, blood and bones and piles of bodies rotting away. It spoke of things she had never felt, and promised so solemnlyher  
/demise if she ever got in contact with it. Shivering, she reached out for her rug. Covering her eyes, she cried.

Hidan was asleep on her futon and didn't seem disturbed by it. It was an inhumane force. Sakura couldn't relax. Not for a second, as long as that chakra presence was in the facility. Tears rolled down her cheek and she just wanted it to be gone. She feltlike  
/prey, cornered by an invisible force. It snapped its teeth at her and she couldn't do anything but to dread the moment it would finally swallow her. She tasted something metallic in her mouth and realised she had bit her inner cheek so hard itdrew  
/blood.

After two thousand heart beats, it was finally gone, and Sakura fell heavily to sleep.

She was woken up by a needle digging into her arm. The red haired doctor, Daisuke, stood beside her as she lay fastened to a metallic table. They probably took another blood sample, she guessed drowsily.

"Who was that?" She groused, not really thinking. "Did you have a monster visit?"

"What?" Daisuke looked dumbfounded for a second. Then he grimaced. "It was our honorable leader. But how could you have known-"

"You idiot! Don't talk about Orochimaru-sama with the subject!" Ana's voice came from the door, and Daisuke sniffed.

"What does it matter? She's disposable anyway. But it's interesting, Ana. She felt him." The red haired man said and scratched his chin.

"Did he visit this subject?" Ana questioned. "This thing is not even that important."

"No, he didn't. He was only here for an update with the Warden in his office."

"That's- peculiar." Ana frowned. "To sense chakra through these thick walls, with a chakra choker, all the way to the other side of the island is-"

"Do you think it might be a side effect of the drug?"

"No, that's not possible. The Kaijū is not even directed at the chakra center."

Sakura tried to listen, but whatever they had injected her with sent her mind into a maze of tunnels with dark and light and fire, and she couldn't understand words nor sentences, because nothing made sense. Nothing ever did.

"Doctors." A voice startled everyone in the surgery room, and Sakura glanced at the door. The drugs in her blood system made her drowsy and dizzy, but she could see bland silvery hair and a pair of round glasses.

"Warden!" Ana bowed and was followed quickly by Daisuke.

"Disposable or possible recruit?" The man with glasses questioned Ana. It was the Warden, and he looked like a sinewy teenager.

 _He's dangerous_. Sakura caught herself thinking. But he looked so weak! The girl frowned, closed her eyes and felt, because that was the only thing she could trust. Her chakra network picked up the Warden's presence and with clarity she saw theblood  
/stained in his soul. It was large, and pressing, but she could feel it was covered by a thin veil. As if he tried to hide that large mass of disgusting chakra! It tasted like the hollow sound of a dying man. It flitted from that to that, ever

changing as the tides, as nuanced as the sunset. As if he knew how to change his signature chakra.

 _Dangerous_.

To Sakura it felt like he could change personalities.

"Disposable. Obedient enough for mundane tasks at the facility. However, it contains the Suna Kaijū we apprehended four months ago from the Suna lab- due to the deliverer getting intercepted by this subject and the subject swallowing the Kajiū. Itis  
/the only one of its kind." Daisuke answered, nervously flipping his pencil.

"Ah, the Kajiū. Not quite disposable yet, then." The Warden mumbled. "Any other use of her while you recreate the drug?"

Ana shrugged. "We could use it for evaluating the Cursed Seal experiments. It seems to have had some kind of shinobi training prior to capture."

"You don't _know_? You don't know for sure she had prior training?" His voice turned icy and chilling suddenly, and even Sakura shivered behind the glass. "Tell me you at least know her name."

Ana struggled.

"W-we deemed it unimportant-"

"There are protocols when capturing or receiving subjects. You ignored the protocols." The Warden said and smiled and Sakura felt bile rise in her throat. Ana shrunk visibly, paling.

"None the matter, your punishment is for later. Have you noticed any changes in her?"

"Y-yes, thank you, Kabuto-sama. Actually, we have. It's a lot more… Perceptive. We think it might be due to the hallucinogen and the miasma of illusions, that it needs to be more aware, but we are not sure yet. Or it could be because of the time

spent in the tank." Daisuke said and loosened the tie around his throat.

"What do you mean, more perceptive?"

"It has an incredible aptitude for chakra sensing. It knew when Orochimaru-sama was here, as it referred to him as a monster visiting." Daisuke stuttered.

"That is perceptive, except if she overheard you talking." The Warden said and smiled.

"No-no such thing! We are always very careful when we evaluate it!" Ana was fast to state. "And we use the Erasure seal frequently."

They left her alone to talk about another subject, and Sakura's eyes drifted to the mirror above her head. Her flesh rotted and her blood boiled and something crawled out of her skin. It was the shadow.

"I see you." Sakura whispered and felt blood fill her mouth with each syllable.

" **Not yet**." Her mouth spoke as blood colored her teeth red. " **Suffer more. Become worthy.** "

"Who are you?"

" **See me**."

* * *

"Give me." Hidan's voice cracked like stones breaking, and Sakura glanced at him over her bowl of slurry rice porridge.

"Can you eat?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Hell yeah. Give me some of that, I'm starving."

"I thought you ran on bullshit."

"Hilarious. I'm fucking hungry, okay? Give me some or I'll gnaw on your nose when you sleep. Your choice."

"You don't have a stomach. The food will only spill out your throat." Sakura pointed out.

"I don't fucking care, feed me that shit."

Sakura shrugged and pulled some rice from the bowl, and fed Hidan the grey mass.

"Don't bite me." Sakura murmured as Hidan chomped down on the rice, his eyes glazing.

"This tastes like horse shit." Hidan wailed, but swallowed the rice anyway.

"I will pass along that to the chef, sir." Sakura said and ate some of her own.

"More."

Sakura fed Hidan until he was satisfied, the porridge trailing out of his cut throat. Sakura sighed and then picked up the head, and held it over the bowel of feces.

"What the fuck are you-"

"I don't want to step on chewed rice porridge, okay?" She sneered as Hidan's cut throat trickled with a grey mass down to the bowel. It splashed as it met the stinking brown feces and Sakura swallowed bile at the sound.

"I feel like I'm shitting." Hidan cackled.

"You probably are." Sakura giggled. Then the last clump of porridge fell from Hidan's throat. She took the head to the bed, and settled it on her lap. Then her fingers began rubbing through Hidan's smooth hair, plucking away grime and stale

blood bits.

"What are you fucking doing."

"Braiding." Sakura chirped. "Stop swearing so much, Hidan-chan. It doesn't fit you."

"Don't fucking braid my hair!"

"But it's pretty." Sakura protested.

"Braid your own fucking hair, I'm already pretty you cheeky brat-"

"I would if I could. And stop fucking swearing." Sakura said melancholy.

A laugh broke out of the head's mouth, high, shrill, and to the brink of hysteria. It was a terrible laugh. And then he started praying again, as Sakura untangled and smoothed out his hair, and braided it again.

"Hey, Hidan. Is someone looking for you?" She hummed in between one verse.

"Probably fucking not." Hidan said as Sakura finished the third braid.

"Okay. How old are you?" She asked and twirled her fingers through his hair.

"Does it matter? Nosy brat, stop asking weird questions." Hidan hummed.

"I suppose it does not matter then." Sakura shrugged, smoothing down his hair again. It was really soft.

"I'm old and young, thanks to Jashin-sama's power." He then said, reluctantly but proudly. Sakura hummed.

"It's been too long since I sacrificed." He muttered then. "Jashin-sama is not satisfied."

The door swung open and they took him away again, and Sakura was left alone with the monsters. When they came back, after only seven hundred heartbeats, the Nikuya kicked him inside. She had never seen a butcher angry, but these ones were. Kicking Hidan'shead  
/around, Sakura watched as they beat the head to a pulp. Then they left.

"Hidan. They're not happy with you, like at all. What did you do?" She asked curiously.

"I bit one of them, a ugly butcher. I bit off his pinky." Hidan snorted, blood coloring his teeth. His cheek started to swell and his eye had a startling black eye. Sakura deadpanned.

"That's all?"

"And sacrificed him." Hidan's voice sounded as if he would have shrugged had he had shoulders.

"How?" Sakura chuckled, amused.

"I was in the mood, and Jashin-sama hasn't had a sacrifice in a while. So I tasted his blood, filled with Jashin's beautiful suffering, and used my very flexible ears and cheek to move around and drew a blood circle." Hidan said with a satisfiedsmirk.

Sakura raised her eyebrows.

"Oh, girl! You should have seen it." Hidan cackled with blood spurting from his mouth. "His head fell right off. It was funny. But not very pleasing. Too quick. Too painless. Jashin-sama was not very satisfied." Hidan grumbled, quickly

changing from his cheerful insane expression to a troubled one, and he clenched his jaws.

"How does the ritual sacrifice work? It seems as senseless as you talking without lungs. And a throat, and vocal chords, and so on." Sakura asked, tapping her fingers to her chapped lips.

"Tooth for tooth, limb for limb, pain for pain." Hidan said with teeth glinting in the dark. "We are equal in suffering and only then. I feel what my sacrifice feels and that is the ultimate offering to Jashin-sama. And I can do it over,

and over, all in his glory."

"You're quite cryptic about this, Hidan." Sakura sighed and eyed a suspicious looking distortion in the dark cell wall. It was caved in slightly, and she could almost see the shape of a nose and an ear.

"I'll show you one day." Hidan laughed.

Then Sakura saw the distortion move and a face in the wall screamed at her, pain slicing its voice as it tried to move out from the wall.

The girl shrank back and almost stumbled over the head. Crackling noises were made as the human inside the wall grasped for something, the arms bending and cracking and breaking inside the wall.

"The fuck-" Hidan wailed as he rolled away.

The disfigured thing finally screamed as it released its head and torso from stone, screaming and screaming and screaming. Sakura closed her eyes and tried to hold back tears.

"It's not real, it's not real." She mumbled and rocked back and forth, but she didn't believe her own words. They rang falsely as the thing in the wall was joined by several other human formed bodies.

"Just stop that." Hidan said and scrunched up his nose. "Can't you do anything about it?"

Sakura cried as another deformed arm shot out of the wall.

"Don't hide from your fear. Face it." Hidan mumbled.

Sakura swallowed harshly and blinked through her tears. Clenching her fist, she rose and the wall with deformities screamed at her. She walked quickly up to it, and then she punched the wall. Not hard enough, as the human inside only grinned at her. Again.  
/And again. And again.

Sakura punched the wall over and over and she felt how her skin ripped open at her knuckles, but immense satisfaction opened like a well inside her. The illusions didn't go away, but the pain she felt was real.

It made her mind come to clarity. She could see the things in the wall clearly, but she also saw the blood dribble from her hands, and she knew they were true.

And when she punched the wall again she felt a crack shudder through her arm, and a soft pounding reverberated through her hand. She didn't care. Punching and hitting the wall until Hidan complained about the squelching noise from her knuckles, she  
/things in the wall was gone. Blood marks covered the wall as if a gruesome painting.

"I faced them." She looked over at the head and smiled. Sticky liquid dripped from her knuckles.

"Yeah." He muttered softly. "That color suits you."

And then the doctors came inside and seemed pleased by the blood painting the wall. Evaluating Sakura's last illusions, they pumped another fill of drugs into her. Ana didn't heal her knuckles, saying they weren't fractured, and Sakura knew she lied.

Then they left, but only after one of the Nikuya kicked Hidan into a wall.

Probably a friend of the one Hidan sacrificed. Sakura thought drowsily. She dragged herself up to the bleeding head, and looked him over with broken hands.

"Don't smear your heathen blood on me." Hidan groaned and blinked. He had probably gotten a concussion. Not that it mattered, he would survive. She wondered if her knuckles would, though. Searching for the small loopholes in the chakra choker,she

found them, and held a her palm over her other hand. The green light wavered slightly and she felt her fractured bones try to retract. It hurt, but it was not as bad as Ana's visits. She persevered with gritted teeth and finished healing. It wasn'tperfect  
/and she was dead tired, but it had to do.

* * *

Ana made a game of healing and hurting, so whenever Sakura expected relief, she broke something, tore something apart, and then healed her. Sakura wondered if she'd ever trust a medic again, if she ever got out. The green healing glow scared her morethan  
/anything.

* * *

"Girl." Hidan growled and rolled on the floor back and forth one day, after another session. Sakura laid feverish on the futon, staring blankly to the stony ceiling. The drugs in her body made her hear "They fucking did somethingto me."

"What? You see hallucinations too?" Sakura gasped, turned over and saw Hidan's head roll to a stop.

"No, fuck no." The head wailed. "I'm not feeling- there's no pain. Just a fucking dull throb."

Sakura blinked.

"Isn't that good?"

"No! I need pain. It's the only thing that's real. Fuck! Girl, I need you to kick me."

"What."

"Hard, not like a nudge. Like I'm a fucking ball. Okay?"

Sakura frowned, but she understood. He needed it, and the pain he felt must be the only thing that kept him going. So she heaved herself up, placed Head Hidan in front of her, and kicked.

The head flew and crashed into the stone wall with a meaty thump, bones cracking, and he bounced back.

Moaning, Hidan lay in a pool of blood at the wall. His teeth were red. His eyes were made of fire and glazed over.

"Did it hurt? I think I broke something." Sakura said and frowned.

"No, it fucking didn't! Didn't even tickle." The head cursed spat a glob of blood.

"Ah."

"They took away the only thing that fucking matters!" Hidan yelled in a guttural sound. "Without pain, I'm not alive."

Sakura frowned.

"Arrgh, Jashin-sama won't see me. Fuck, fuck!"

"They must be experimenting on your immortality, I'd guess. You always talk about pain and how it gets you closer to Jashin. If they break you, take away your pain, they must be testing you to see if you'll become mortal again." Sakura musedas she  
/sat down cross legged beside the moaning head.

Hidan's eyes widened slightly.

"Hidan, I think you're dying." Sakura deadpanned.

"I can't die, what nonsense are you talking about?"

"You stink like the dead. Your blood has coagulated at your throat, there's no fresh blood leaking anymore." She tried. Hidan stubbornly continued to say no, it wasn't possible, and started reciting Jashin-sama's glorious will of sacrifice and

pain. Sakura sighed. Hidan was too stubborn to function.


	8. Put Head Hidan on Body Hidan

**Chapter 8 - Put Head Hidan on Body Hidan**

Sakura stared blankly at the wall of her cell, the flickering light bulb above her head casting shadows around her.

"What does Jashin look like?" Sakura asked without thinking.

Hidan stopped praying and thought.

"Like death, I suppose." He heaved. "I don't know. He's ethereal, intangible and doesn't have a shape. But he whispers to me."

"Not like… Boiling blood?" Sakura wondered, thinking back to the strange illusion of whispers and shadows.

"What?" Hidan asked, both irritated and interested. "When did you-"

Something crashed outside the cell, and Sakura jerked her head up. Listening, she could hear howls and crashes. The howls were cut short, one by one.

The door flew open and a headless body ran into the cell, bumping into the wall with flailing arms. Sakura stared at it.

"Is that-"

"My fucking _god_ , body, get over here! I'm over here, you fucking sack of meat!" Head Hidan howled.

The black cloaked body seemed to react to the voice, how Sakura couldn't imagine, and started towards Sakura.

"No, here!" Hidan wailed and Sakura had to push away the body to keep it from taking her head.

"I thought you were shorter." Sakura mumbled and evaded a swing of Hidan's body's grabbing arms.

"Put my head on my body, girl." Hidan howled as his body went in jerky circles searching for its head. Sakura picked up Hidan's head and smiled wide eyed.

"Sure. Put Head Hidan on Body Hidan." She chuckled and successfully stopped the body from moving, and it stilled somehow.

"Can you, like, stitch it together?" Hidan asked and tried to look down on his body. "Do the medic thing!"

"I don't know. I've only healed very shallowly before." Sakura muttered as she tried to reach the tall body's stumped throat. She was quite definitely too short.

"Just fucking _try_ , hurry up." Hidan growled deep in his cut throat. Sakura sighed, punched the body's stomach with a bit of chakra so it doubled over and she was quick to put Hidan's head on the stump of his body.

"We have no time, come on." A voice that crackled like fire was heard from outside. Hidan's eyes sparkled like lightning as he saw the figure outside while Sakura tried to heal the skin and stitch it together on the stumped throat.

"Kakuzu, you bastard!" Hidan howled, and Sakura tried to grip his head and keep his body put together at the same time. After a quick snide remark to keep still, she glanced at the man and froze at his immense chakra presence.

"Don't talk. It's unnecessary. We need to get out of here." The tall man with the scariest pupil less green eyes Sakura had seen said. She shrunk and licked her dry lips.

 _Dangerous_.

"I'm gonna fucking kill you, you cursed son of a bitch!" Hidan yelled as Sakura tried to heal the head onto his body. "Not even worth as a sacrifice. You disgusting worm-"

"Don't struggle!" Sakura snapped, coming back from her awe of the tanned man at the door. "You're not making this easy for me, you idiot. Fight later when you actually have an attached head."

Hidan stopped struggling, but didn't stop giving death glares. Kakuzu's green pupiless neon green eyes wandered over to the the pinkette with slight interest, as if only then deigning to acknowledge her existence. Hidan felt skin drape over his throat,  
and then he growled at Kakuzu again. Hidan knew those eyes.

"No, not her. She knows pain, you blasphemous heathen. She's worthy." Hidan snapped at Kakuzu.

"Does she have a bounty?" Kakuzu drawled.

"No." Hidan snorted. "No money's on her, you _fucking_ greedy bastard. Look it up in one of your cursed books if you want, you won't find anything."

Sakura felt her chakra draining through the choker and sweat gathered on her forehead. She had to concentrate, or she'd fail. Like worms the skin draped and wriggled over itself and over the coagulated injury. The spine, however, was a problem altogether.  
She still needed to hold the head or it would fall to the side of Hidan's shoulder and the skin would break again.

"This is the best I can do." She said then, and let the head go. Somehow it was still attached, and her work was horrible and butchered but it actually worked.

"You're so _slow_." Hidan wailed but cracked his neck and the spine seemed to fall in place somehow. His regenerating abilities were frightening.

"Why'd you come back for him?" Sakura found herself asking their savior and Hidan fell over with a yelp and a curse, not having control over his lower body yet.

"We need him. _Apparently_." The stitched tall man said and glanced over his shoulder. Fire crackled in the distance, and Sakura wondered if it was a decoy Kakuzu had set up. Hidan struggled to set his head straighter. Sakura heard a weird  
crack come from his spine again, but instead she focused on their creepy eyed savior.

"Who's _we_?" Sakura asked and too late, she realised it was the wrong question to ask. Something black, thin, long sprouted from the tall stitched man and in a blink, black threads snaked around her throat, lifted her up, squeezing.

"Augh-" Sakura choked. Stars twinkled in front of her eyes.

" _Come join me,_ " pretty blue eyes said.

" **See me** ," the blood in a shadow said.

A snap, then she crumpled to the floor, breathing and coughing violently. Hidan held his head steady, but in his other hand a blood red scythe rested. The black threads had been cut, and the rest snaked back to Kakuzu.

"How much does she know?" The tall man growled.

"Nothing." Hidan snapped and waved with his vermillion colored scythe. "She's just curious, since I fucking told her nothing. See?"

"Curiosity would be her death."

"She's just stupid." Hidan growled and Sakura glanced at him with daggers in her eyes as she tried to regulate her breathing. "But she's smart enough to understand she won't ask more questions."

"I'll let your pet live, Hidan. But it will cost you." Kakuzu said and his voice sliced like a sword of ice. "80% of our next payment."

"Whatever."

Hidan broke her chakra choker with pure force and Sakura gasped. Her contained chakra flowed through her body and she felt alive for the first time in forever. Her network of chakra spread and she could feel all sorts of living things around her. Gasping  
and struggling to get used to the living fierce force in her body she started laughing.

"It's _back_." She gasped through her laughter. Hidan said nothing, but she imagined him smiling too. In her peripheral vision she saw illusions appearing everywhere, eyes of monsters, but she didn't care for this moment was too precious  
to be destroyed by the drug in her body. Her chakra seemed to react with the illusions heavily, and snakes gathered at her feet to restrain her, but Hidan snatched her out of it as he called to her.

"Let's fucking go already."

"Right on." Sakura murmured. "I hate this cell."

Kakuzu went back out to clear a path, and they followed. The stark lights of the fluorescent pipes in the hallway blinded her momentarily, and she tried to adjust her eyes from being contained in darkness for so long. She heard Hidan chuckle, and she  
tried to make out his blurry figure next to her.

"In this light, you sure look crazier than I thought you would." Hidan laughed, high and shrill. Sakura didn't want to think about how she looked. Afterall, she hadn't really slept for months. She stank, her clothes were covered in all sorts  
of bodily fluids and maybe some of Hidan's brain matter and her arms were scarred from her own scratching. During her first few months she had tried to scratch out the eyes in her arms.

"Thank you, I know I look marvellous. You look good too, Hidan. I miss the rat in your face though." Sakura clapped his shoulder. It felt strange. Hidan actually had a body after all, and a tall one at that. All lean white muscles and a deep  
v-neck in that dark robe with red clouds sewn at the hems.

"Shut up. Jashin-sama, I hate rats." Hidan mumbled.

"Seems like more guards are coming." Sakura said and glanced at the broken cell door, where screams and chakras blended together. Kakuzu moved away from them, towards the decoy and the chakra signatures Sakura recognised as butchers and guards.  
The thin black threads started to sprout from his back, and Sakura watched in horrid fascination.

"Hey, girl. Come with me." Hidan said, as if commenting on the weather. As if it was clear as day she'd say yes. Gods, she kind of wanted to.

"I'm mortal, Hidan. I wouldn't survive for long in your world." Sakura smiled, and she felt pride in being asked to follow, sadness in rejecting. But she needed to go home. Duty called, and she had to feel safe again. She had to feel sane again.  
And Hidan was nothing but insane. "See you around on the outside."

Hidan blinked, then cleared his throat. The scar tissue had already faded, and the skin stretched at his throat. It seemed he hadn't anticipated rejection.

"Girl. Next time you see the shadow, say 'tsantsa I am'." He said quietly, then he shrugged. "Yeah well okay. Bye then." He said and ran into the prison, slashing with his three bladed scythe to make a way of blood before him. The  
Nikuya fell like dominos of heavy flesh. She could hear his hysterical laughter blend with screams of agony as he went out of her vision. Sakura hoped he had found the doctors Ana and Daisuke.

 _Ana_.

She wanted to kill that monster, but she knew she couldn't- not now. When she was stronger, she would come back, and explain to her in detail how she killed Yuji. She would enjoy it.

"Bye, you idiot." She whispered. "Make them pay."

 _What was that about seeing the shadow?_

 **He's a lunatic. Don't think about it.**

Sakura agreed with her inner voice, and tried to move through the rubble in the corridor. He had never asked her name, she recalled.

 _I'll give him my name when we meet again. I'll be taller by then, too._

Rushing through the corridor, she saw a sign at a door reading 'Head Chief of Medical Staff'. Sakura spat at the door and was about to take off again, but something held her back. Taking a chance, Sakura snuck inside. The office was empty, grey and had  
only a bookshelf and a desk. The metallic desk was stacked neatly with papers and she quickly looked through them. Then she found a file with her cell number written on it. Not caring to look inside she snatched it away and ran through the door of  
the office.

She almost ran into a few Nikuya when she hadn't been keeping up her attention net, but at the last moment she slid behind a pillar. They rushed past her, leaving a scent of blood and water. Sakura left the pillar when their footsteps died out, and ran  
towards another corridor. It was like a maze, and she kept running and hiding and running.

Stopping to catch her breath, she angrily looked down on her useless legs. Her muscles had twined and become weaker in her stay in the cell, and she was probably slower than a civilian now. Cursing under her breath she caught a glimpse of a snake sliding  
behind a corner, but she didn't have time for the disgusting illusions, not right now - so she concentrated hard on her chakra net.

To her right a few corridors away a buzz of chakras stepped on her chakra net, and more were coming that way. So she went into the opposite direction and found a corridor that felt more clammy than the others, and colder. The cement soon turned into rock,  
and she crashed through an old wooden door.

What met her eyes made her almost cry out in desperation.

The world in front of her was blue. It seemed for a moment to lay still, eternally tranquil, an aquamarine splashed velvet fabric draping over everything in front of her eyes. Stillness. Transcendence. The sound of nothing but the breeze and the waves  
softly caressing the rocks. The canvas was painted blue. And the strokes were ever changing, yet always portraying the same scenery. Always the same. The cotton candy clouds were a milky white and they were scarce this day.

 _I'm on an island. A fucking island. Great, just great._ Sakura almost yelled, but instead bit her lips. She preferred the vast ocean any day over the black cell with monsters hiding under every stone.

 _I'd rather drown than go back._

And that was all it took for Sakura to throw herself off the cliff and the mouth of the cave into the dark depths of the ocean.

Plummeting through the windy air Sakura almost regretted her rash decision, but she had no time to do anything other than take a deep breath before the waves swallowed her.

Wet suffocating coldness woke her instantly as she hit the water's surface. Water filled her mouth as she tumbled in the darkness. Confusion and panic rose bile in her throat along with the water and she unconsciously took another breath, and water spilled  
into her lungs. For seconds she forgot how to swim and thrashed helplessly in a dark cold nothing. Her hands pushed and she turned to instinct and kicked her feet, like a dog. She had to swim up. She clawed her way through the water and broke the  
surface with a wet cough. And then she breathed in.

In her panicked state she suddenly recalled an exercise Kakashi had told them about, but never taught. Water walking.

Sakura clawed in the furious waves and dispelled chakra to her palms. The water bubbled and boiled, but it wasn't solid. It wasn't at all like tree walking. The trees were organic and a solid material, but the water was a raging liquid that wouldn't stay  
still.

 _So my chakra won't stay still either. It has to move. Flow._

 **Atta girl.**

She tried again, and the chakra tickled her palms and suddenly the water was somewhat solid under her fingers. Shoving herself up, Sakura channeled chakra to her bare feet as well. It worked to her immense satisfaction, and she took a step on the unruly  
ocean surface. It was amazing. She stood with her bare feet on an ocean, and she could feel the currents brush her heels.

Sakura looked over her shoulder and saw plumes of smoke rise from the mountain on the island.

 _I better get out of here._

 **Agreed**.

So Sakura ran the best she could on the surface of the unruly water, towards the land she could see in the faraway distance.


	9. Haphephobia

**Chapter 9 - Haphephobia**

Sakura was exhausted of chakra drainage when she was washed up on a shore. Shivering and coughing, she dragged herself further up the beach towards the few wind wrecked houses littering the small beach, which she presumed were poor fisher shelters. A few sea weed slabs of green stuck to her scalp and clothes, and her bare feet had scraped against sea clams and bled shallowly.

Sakura hacked her teeth as she huddled inside one shelter under the sound of faraway seagull songs. The sun was high in the sky, and a few clouds were in the far distance. The ocean brought cold and strong winds to the shore, and Sakura's mind was a mess. She tasted salt between her teeth.

 _Where do I even start? I'm too weak to move. I need to rest. But I want to go home. It's so cold._

Then she saw a woman walk towards her, and it seemed she hadn't noticed her. She was picking up cockles in a basket, and her wild curly black hair with speckles of grey spilled down her small shoulders. Sakura coughed, and the woman startedly looked up at her.

"Oh, little boy! How are you? Are you okay?" The older woman came rushing to Sakura, bending down to inspect her body and soaked prisoner shirt. She gasped as she saw the wounds pattern Sakura's visible arms. "Good ebbing graces, what happened to you, child!"

Sakura frowned at the annoying woman, she had no time to be cuddled by a stranger - she had to get back to Konoha. But as Sakura was about to say something not very nice, the brown haired woman touched her shoulder.

She froze at the touch.

 _Ana. It's Ana. She's playing with me. Ana. She's smiling smiling smiling_

She couldn't move. Sweat started to dribble down her back and she felt nausea fill her throat. She couldn't move a muscle, couldn't blink.

 _She's touching me she's touching me_

The woman didn't seem to be bothered by Sakura's stillness and took her hand, dragging her further from the beach and into the nearby small village. Sakura was forced to move, but her face had drained of all color.

"It's going to be okay, little boy, I'll take care of you. It's going to be alright." The old woman cooed as they went inside a small house, which was close to shambles with fishnet and shells littering the floor and walls. Sakura couldn't think. The woman was _touching her_.

 _Lies lies lies stop touching me please stop_

"This used to be my son's room." The woman said and lead Sakura into a small blue colored room, with small wooden toys hooked to the ceiling. They clinked eerily together in a mournful children's tune. "He sleeps with the Sea king now. Neptune bless his soul."

Sakura still couldn't speak. The touch of the woman's hand on her shoulder irradiated with fuming warmth and Sakura felt her mouth fill with bile. The woman suddenly held Sakura's face in her cupped palms and smiled, insanity and grief flecking her brown eyes.

"But you came back." The woman whispered and her eyes shimmered, kissing Sakura's cheek. "Didn't you, Yura-kun? Neptune let you come back in this boy. I have waited ten years for you and I never stopped praying. Everyday I pick cockles at the place you drowned. And now you're back."

Sakura puked.

The woman yelped and lead her to the bathroom, quickly shutting the door, yelling something about cleaning the mess up. Sakura heaved into the toilet, letting her stomach's content spill out glumly. The last meal of rice porridge from the cell slopped into the hole, disgust and relief spread inside her chest.

 _She's not touching me anymore._

Sakura realised she had stopped shaking, and wiped her mouth furiously. Why had she become paralysed? The woman didn't even look like Ana. They were as different as the moon and the sun. Why did she despise the touch?

A set of clothes the woman had thrown inside laid on the floor, and the girl picked them up after sliding the dirty prisoner outfit off. The dry clothes fitted her strangely well, the baby blue shirt hung loosely on her small frame and the brown hakama pants almost slipped down her hips. Sakura found the washbin to her right and splashed some cold water on her face, trying to clear her mind.

She looked up into the mirror and saw a frightened pale child, desperate green bulging eyes almost clawing itselves out of the holes in her skull, her frayed lips quivered uncontrollably. The water dribbled down her nose.

Sakura gasped.

 _I look like this? No, no…_

 **We need a mask. To cover our fears.**

Sakura couldn't stop looking at herself. Of course, she was always scared that illusions lurked behind every corner, but she hadn't thought about what her face did. She hadn't really cared. But now, as she saw herself, she realised she had probably looked like a scared-to-death child for months.

 _We can't look like this!_

 **As I said, a mask. Hide what you feel.**

 _How? I can't even control my face! I didn't know my eyes were this wide, I didn't even know my lips quiver like that._

 **Try breathing deeply, there. Like that. Close your eyes, think of nothing. Think of the sky. I'll help you.**

Sakura closed her eyes, listening to her inner voice's commands. She slowly opened her eyes, feeling her face numb and slowly become more relaxed. She stopped clenching her teeth.

 **There, see? We did it. A blank mask.**

Sakura studied her face. Her mouth was set in a stern line, her viridian eyes indifferent. She was reminded of Sasuke-kun's expression, with the exception of the angry eyebrows. Hers were relaxed, neutral.

 **It's a start. Soon, we will have to smile.**

 _Fun._ Sakura thought blandly. _Great._

 **We need to go, Outer. I really dislike that cuddling woman.**

 _Me too. Let's get out of here._

The woman called Kakehi was really stupid. Sakura said weakly, letting her blank mask fall to reveal her 'true face', that she needed to sleep. The woman nodded and said she'd get some blankets for her, and then she'd sing lullabies for her until she slept, like she had done so many times before to Yura-kun.

Silently, Sakura slipped out of the house and ran a few blocks away towards the harbour. She didn't even feel bad about the old woman, not having said goodbye. She was crazy.

When she found the small port she saw a fisherman haul the fishnets from his boat onto a small carriage. He had tanned skin and pearly white and wild hair, and his beard reached his chest. Sakura went up to him and greeted him politely. He squinted at her, and she saw his eyes were a deep blue, and it somehow reminded her of Naruto-kun.

"Ya ain't from here, boy." He gruffed and frowned as he discerned her with squinted eyes. "Ya really need to eat sumthin. You is just skin an' bones."

"Well, yes, I am hungry. But it doesn't matter, I'll be fine. Could you, or someone else you might know, possibly take me to the port in Ishiwake?" She asked, hoping it wasn't too far away, and that the fisherman was a humble person.

"Ah, I don't know 'bout that." He said and shrugged his shoulders. "We're but simple fisher folks here, ya see, and we don't sail farther than the Cobbler's Head. No fish farther than that ya see, and there's storms and rogue Sea shinobi lurkin' round."

"Oh. Thank you, anyway. Sorry for disturbing you." Sakura bowed, disappointment welling in her chest.

"So polite, ain't ya, boy." The sailor smiled widely, showing off discolored teeth. "You gonna hafta take the long way inlands, probably. Ya have a map?"

"No." Sakura shook her head.

"I have a spare one sumwhere." The sailor gruffed and started looking through his leather sack. He whooped when he found a torn scroll and handed it to Sakura. "Here, take it. I'm feeling generous today. We're in the village Kusaya, if ya didn't know. Good luck on yer journey, boy. And here, have a freshly caught mackerel scad. Ya probably need it. All skin an' bones..." He grumbled.

"Thank you, so much." Sakura said and accepted the dead fish and tried to smile, but it strained uncomfortably, so she stopped trying. Waving goodbye and leaving the fisherman, she unrolled the withered scroll as she walked towards the village's outer parts. The scroll was old and well used, and it took a while until she found the village she was in on the map. _Kusaya._ Sakura frowned. They had named the village after a salted and fermented fish?

The journey to Ishiwake was not very far, and she guessed it would take a day's walk to get there. Her muscles were still sore from swimming and water walking and it hurt to just move, so she dismissed the thought of running.

Limping decidedly into the murky forest, a loud gurgling noise made her stop. It was her stomach, growling promptly and she looked to the mackerel in her hand. Deciding to eat it while it was still fresh she went further into the woods and gathered some logs, and started a fire with a tiny Katon jutsu, barely allowed by her thin chakra reserves. She didn't care to scale the fish and grilled it on a stick over the fireplace. When it was charred she took it off the fireplace, blew on it and then bit into it.

The relief was instant and she almost shoved the whole fish down her throat, but she knew she had to conserve it and bit small pieces of the flesh, carefully and slowly eating it. The slight crunchy resistance was alien to her teeth, what with having been used to mashed sloshy rice porridge her teeth took the fish as quite the challenge. When her stomach stopped growling, the fish was half finished and she shoved it into her pocket for later. It was too early to sleep, so Sakura started to walk with the direction of the map and the stars in the night sky to guide her.

The long walk to Ishiwake drained her energy, and she needed to stop for breaks a bit too often, more than she would have even six months ago. Her old wounds ached and her body shivered as she over-used her muscles. Her toe ached the most, the one Ana had cut off. Sakura wondered if it had healed back properly, what with her very limited medical skills at the time. She slept once during the night, but was too twitchy and paranoid to truly fall in a deep sleep. And when she did sleep, she was haunted by nightmares and Ana's long red fingernails.

Sakura wondered feverishly, as she lay on the cold forest ground, if she was suffering withdrawal symptoms due to the various drugs they had injected her with. When she vomited for the fourth time during one hour, she knew it was the case. A small delirious part of her wanted to go _back_ , to be relieved of the feverish withdrawal pains, but the small part that wished for it was easily squished into nothing when she thought of Ana. No drugs in the world could make her go back to her.

After walking a whole day, Sakura was exhausted and thirsty when she glanced on the map again. She saw that she was close, and some kind of excitement bubbled in her chest. It gave her energy, and her walk fell into a sprint. Jogging up to the gates after an hour, she heard the bustling village and seagulls sing in the air. She licked her dry lips.

The village of Ishiwake was busy, smelled like fish and people crowded the streets along with differents stands. The girl felt lost for a moment as she walked deeper into the port, disoriented with all these civilians shouting and laughing around her. Her chakra network picked up several shinobi presences, and she was careful to avoid them. They could belong to the research facility, searching for escaped subjects. Sakura's stomach grumbled loudly, and she twisted her face in a grimace at the bottomless pit of nothing in her belly. The mackerel had not been nearly enough to feed her malnutritioned body.

Slipping by a stand selling fruits, she looked at a red apple and picked it up in her hand to scrutinise it.

"Ya hafta pay for that, boy!" The old man behind the stand said sweetly but his eyes were hard. Sakura flinched and dropped the apple, but the merchandiser had not seen that she had snuck another fruit behind her back as she scuttled away.

It was the first time in Sakura's life that she had stolen something. She didn't know how to feel about it, a vestige of regret flaring in her mind, but at the same time- she _was so very hungry and thirsty._ Survival fought back the moral urge to bring the apple back to the gruff man at the stand, and she snuck the fruit up to her mouth.

Biting into the green apple, Sakura almost cried. It was delicious and fresh, sour and sweet. No worms wriggled inside it and it was not rotten in any place. Her throat was still dry, however, and she searched the market with sharp eyes as she ate all of the apple, and even its core.

A merchant walked gruffly past her and she bumped into him, taking his water bottle quickly and softly from his belt. He cursed after her, but seemed too stressed to look back as he hurried along. Gurgling the water greedily, she almost laughed and snorted water out her nose. Clear water, not having the taste of piss and vomit, truly was a dream. The flask was made of animal skin and had a loose thread around it, which she fastened around her thin waist.

She needed more food, and a way to get back to Konoha. Sakura strolled to the harbor, looking at the ships. Her sensitive net of chakra was trampled upon all over at the harbour by oblivious shinobi, and she knew she had to change her appearance, if just for a bit. Her chakra was back in full force, the chakra choker having almost made her used to the lack of it, and she carefully made it 'bubble', as she called it. To her satisfaction, it seemed her little chakra pool had grown a bit since her capture. Which was strange, but not all too uncommon since she had meditated a lot. Chakra grew from that.

A boy howled from a ship, as he flew through the air clutching a rope in circles around the main mast. He seemed free, innocent and happy. Picking up his appearance, Sakura made the subtle signs for a quick henge, her chakra carefully being distributed to be just enough. Her face wobbled and distorted, and her skin was suddenly covered in a freckled tan and her hair grew a bit. She took a lock of her now wavy hair and found it a coffee brown colour. Smiling, she continued to walk through the harbour, inspecting the ships.

Most of the ships were about to leave, with the sailors distributing the supplies of food and water on cartwheels. Picking up different accents and languages, she continued to walk along the clear indigo water. Then an accent she recognised made her stop, and pretend to drink some more water from her flask.

"The storm's coming up fast, Captain. I suggest we leave in an hour to Mori." The shipmate on the nearest ship said, looking up to the clear blue sky. An old man with a white beard had a strange pipe in the slit of his mouth, puffing smoke and huffing.

"The supplies won't be ready by then, and we still have to wait for the delivered cargo." He mumbled.

The captain suddenly caught Sakura's eyes and he waved to her with his long wooden pipe. She hesitantly waved back.

"Brat!" The captain grinned. "Weren't you supposed to sail with Gyaraki-san?"

Sakura frowned and then realised he knew the boy she had seen on the other ship which she had henged into, and she quickly grinned in a boyish way, shaking her head.

"He let me off!" She yelled, in the same gruff accent the white bearded man talked with. "Where y'all headed?"

"I told ya last night, didn't I, Aoki? Your memory is that of a seagull, son. We're going to Mori to ship some cargo." The white bearded man chuckled. "We'll be back in a week."

Sakura blinked, and recalled that Mori was the nearest fishing village to Konoha according to the map she had memorised. She couldn't believe her luck.

"Can I go with you this time instead?" Sakura yelled.

"Hm, we always need eyes on the main mast." The man gruffed. "And Gyaraki-san really let you off? Why?"

"He got another shipmate, he ain't need me!" Sakura said and frowned, hoping the excuse was good enough for the old captain.

"Well, fine. Come over here and help out then." The captain said and smiled. Sakura briefly wondered what his relationship was with the boy she had henged into, and then she jumped over the harbour's edge and onto the ship. The captain laughed.

"I always forget how agile you are, Aoki."

Sakura noticed how her chakra protested slightly at the layered henge that constantly drained tidbits of her energy, and she needed to concentrate hard and not let it slip.

Sakura watched the sailors scramble on the ship, loosening the mast and yelling to each other. She tried to memorize the way they talked, moved and how they did the tasks on the ship. Before not too long, a large box was rolled up in the tramp and shoved into the storage in the ship's lower deck.

"Ready to sail!" A shipmate yelled and they were off. Sakura was assigned mast duty, climbing up the rat's nest and up to the main sail, and swung somehow around on ropes, and she sometimes clumsily almost fell but due to her old training at the Academy, her slip ups came and went unnoticed. In the late evening Sakura was supposed to get some onions from the storage room.

"Just don't go into the backroom, Aoki. The cargo can't be compromised." The captain gruffed at the rudder.

"Yah." Sakura nodded, not thinking further on what the cargo could be.

When she walked down into the darkness of the storage room, she let her henge fall, and then a wolf howled. Sakura froze and saw a giant grey wolf circle her from behind and she bit down a scream as her mother was on the floor in front of the wolf, dying with wet coughs and blood spilling out her throat in a crimson necklace.

Her mother died with a gruesome rasping last breath.

The monster wolf suddenly screamed when it looked into the dark corner, as if it was ripped apart, and ran crashing through the ship's door. Sakura blinked. The worms clinging to her mother's rotting corpse fell away and the dead woman paled when she looked into the corner. She suddenly sloshed to the ship's floor in a pool of blood, trailing away from the room.

Sakura numbly stumbled further into the dark, only knowing that her illusions somehow had been _scared_ of whatever was in there. Could it be worse than her living nightmares?

 _I doubt it._

And then Sakura saw her. A beautiful girl shivered in the dark, sitting with her knees up under her chin, cradling herself with thin arms, watching Sakura warily. Her hair was ruffled and dirty, but the shiny locks of platinum gold spilled through the grit and down her chest. She wore a white dress and her pale creamy complexion was like the moon at night. Sakura couldn't stop staring at her. To say the girl was stunning would almost be like an insult.

"Hello?" Sakura asked. The girl only shivered and looked warily at Sakura. Her eyes were clear blue and petrified. "It's okay, I'm not here to hurt you." Sakura whispered.

 _You scared my illusions away, please let me come closer._

She moved to the girl who crammed herself against the wall. Sakura sat down beside her, a safe meter away.

"I'm Sakura." Sakura pointed at herself. "Who are you?"

"Freja." The girl said. The name rang foreign and her accent was strange.

"How did you get here?"

"I can not speak language very well." She said with a broken accent. "What you want with me?"

"I don't want anything from you." Sakura said and frowned. "I'm just taking a lift with this ship to my home, Konoha."

"Home..." Freja whispered and clenched her fist under her chin, as if grasping for something at her throat. "I want, too."

"You want to go home?"

"Yes. Far away." The pretty girl sobbed. "But caught. Like a _gädda_."

"You're here as a captive then." Sakura sighed, as she had already suspected it. "I know. It sucks."

She recalled the three times she had been captured. And she wished that for none- the helplessness, the anger, the loneliness, the feeling of abandonment. That's the reason why she lightened up and looked at Freja.

 _I can do it._

"I'll help you escape. I promise. When we get to the port outside Konoha, I'll get you off this ship." She said, determination settling in her chest. Saving the girl could compromise her escape from the ship while at the port in Mori, but she didn't care.

"Not swim." Freja shook her head.

Sakura thought for a bit.

"That's fine. I'll carry you." She smiled. "I can walk on water, you know."

"You- dark witch?" Freja looked even more scared, but at the same time she seemed intrigued.

"No, no!" Sakura laughed. "I'm a shinobi. We have what we call chakra. See?" She said and made the hand signs for a short henge. Her face wobbled and fell, and her skin turned the same colour as Freja's. Her hair grew into light blond locks and her clothes wrung itself inside out and flowed into a white dress.

" _Du_ \- me!" Freja screamed, breathed deeply, but then after touching Sakura's face she laughed. It tingled and was like music. Sakura tried not to flinch when Freja touched her cheek.

"I can magic too." Freja smiled warmly, and from her cupped hands sprouted a flower. A dandelion. Sakura froze. She hadn't even made hand seals. Did she have a strong connection to the Earth element? But it grew from her skin!

Sakura let go of her henge of Freja, and stared at the yellow flower.

"For you." Freja smiled shyly and gave the dandelion to her. The girl was adorable and Sakura felt almost giddy as she accepted the flower.

"Before escape, I need my necklace. They took." Freja said and it seemed new determination settled in her voice. "Cannot go without it."

Sakura frowned.

"Is it really that important?"

" _Ja_." Freja nodded vigorously. "They have in cabin, captain's room."

"That- won't be easy." Sakura mumbled. "I need to go back with the onions, so they won't suspect anything. I'll come back later, okay?"

"Okay." Freja repeated and nodded, a shy smile playing on her lips. "Thank you."

"I haven't done anything yet." Sakura laughed, then rose and went out the storage room. She almost forgot to put the henge back on, but just in time to stumble upon the cook of the ship

"Aoki, you're too slow." The big bellied man snorted and gruffly took the onions from her hands. Sakura ate with the crew and snuck a few pieces of bread into her trousers. Later, after a look out on the main mast for cliffs in the darkening night, she went back to the storage room.

Freja sat at the same spot she had left her, and happily accepted the bread. Their conversation was halting but they managed, what with Freja's limited vocabulary. Gestures and facial expressions said a whole more lot than words sometimes, Sakura noticed.

"We'll be at the Mori port by morning." Sakura said and stretched her aching muscles. The captain had put her hard at work. "Where do you plan to go when we get there?"

"Will be fine. Always find way." Freja said seriously. "But need necklace."

"Yes, yes. The necklace." Sakura sighed and scratched her shaved head. "I'll try to steal it back tonight."

"Eternal gratitude." Freja said and laid her hand on Sakura's. _Touch._ Sakura's hand quickly retracted, and Freja looked at her strangely.

"You know I'm a girl, right?" Sakura smiled uncertainly.

"Yes?" Freja looked at her questioningly.

"Nevermind." Sakura shook her head and rose. "I'll be back soon."

She left Freja in the dark of the storage room and walked up to the ship's floor. She saw the captain at the rudder and waltzed up to him.

"The winds are kind tonight." The captain said as Sakura walked up to him. "Suspiciously so. We expected a mild storm."

"Maybe Neptune let us off the hook tonight." Sakura said causally, remembering the religion the seafolks prayed to.

" _And waves shall always carry us home._ " The captain said and looked out over the dark horizon. "I thought you didn't believe in the Seaking, Aoki? You always accuse us of being superstitious."

"I don't." Sakura shrugged, playing to the Captain's tune. "But one never truly knows what powers lies in the sea and slumbers."

"That is true. You have grown a bit, haven't you, Aoki." The captain smiled and patted Sakura's head. "A bit taller, too."

"You bet!" Sakura smirked. She liked the captain, but she definitely couldn't reveal herself to be Haruno Sakura, and not Aoki the ship boy. She feared what kind of reaction the captain would have.

Sakura took another swing up the main mast, and spotted a faraway cliff formation. She slid down the tree mast and told the captain, and he nodded and steered the ship out of the cliffs way.

"You did good, Aoki. Your eyes are as good as ever." The captain grinned. "Do you want a treat? I have some wagashi in the cabin."

 _This can't be more perfect._

"Thanks, cap'n! I'll go get it. I won't share, you know?" Sakura cheered and got an agreeing nod from the old man, so she walked into the home of the captain of the ship. It was a room without much luxury, but a few golden mirrors were in the room and expensive looking saké bottles. Sakura scanned the room quickly, quietly looking through the drawers and under the bed, but she couldn't find the necklace. She was about to give up when something sparked in the corner of her eye. A large cockroach was about to devour her with large yellow teeth, but as Sakura stepped back to the window it screeched and fell back, crawling away.

Sakura frowned and looked behind her, to the circled window. A wooden plank creaked as she shifted, and Sakura bent down to inspect it. As she fiddled with the plank it turned out to be loose, so she got it up and underneath the floor there was a box. It was a simple wooden box and Sakura opened it expectantly. A necklace lay on a red velvet fabric, with seashells and golden pieces twined together.

"Found you." Sakura whispered triumphantly. And then the door creaked open, letting in a gust of salty wind and the presence of someone else behind her.


End file.
